WHITE PAPER: PENDING EXTINCTIONS IN LEGAL PRACTICE AREAS

By Christopher P. Kriesen ([email protected])

In the next five (possible) to ten (certainly) years, the extinction of several legal practice areas will begin and be nearly complete. Most lawyers have not realized this looming future is inevitably arriving because we are trained to think about how to solve problems, not about the demands of the marketplace.

I spent a year studying at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (an online, eight-class program in innovation). A fundamental element of any successful business strategy is finding a market need and then selling a product that meets that need. Businesses build themselves on this simple premise: see people who want to catch baseballs; sell them a baseball gloves. This white paper asserts that lawyers need to apply this same thinking to their practice area development.

Lawyers don’t think this way. We think about how to be better at what we do. Sometimes we think about how to market what we do. We don’t do market studies to find emerging markets or blue oceans (markets with a need but no providers). Instead, we just sell our services to practice areas that interest us, where we found a job, or what seems most profitable.

What product do lawyers sell? I think our service is solving a problem, whether it be a dispute, a transaction, or compliance with regulations. Lawyers think about how to provide those services in better ways; business people think about what are the emerging and blue ocean problem areas. Business people also think about what markets are disappearing, so they don’t enter that market, or don’t invest too much more in that market if they already occupy it.

The Connecticut Judicial Branch publishes on its webpage statistics on cases added to their dockets and disposed. No one seems aware this information is available. It provides valuable information about our legal market, which in turn, lawyers should use to think like business people about their practice areas.

The latest information period, July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017, reveals the following about civil cases:

New Cases Filed: 49,936; Pending Cases: 54,148

And, by type of case:

        Administrative Appeals: 1,569

        Contracts: 11,562 (collections 9,451)

        Eminent Domain: 118

        Civil Protective Order: 1,985

        Property: 13,930 (foreclosure 13,306)

Torts: 5,396 (premises 2,596; prod liab 155; med mal 250; legal mal 93; dog bite 266)

        Motor vehicle personal injury: 10,932

        Housing: 4,212

The takeaways are as follows: foreclosure is the largest part of the docket (25%), next is motor vehicle personal injury (20%), and then collections (17%). If any one of those categories disappear, a major civil work category (in suit) will disappear.

Let’s return to my initial premise: the product lawyers sell is solving problems. Great. A worthwhile service.

But there is a better kind of service: elimination of the conditions which create the problems. Some lawyers are involved in this work in the form of risk management, but most lawyers do not work in the area of problem prevention, in part because it is often not our area of expertise.

I attended a very interesting legal presentation a year ago. The topic was about the legal ramifications of driverless cars: who is liable and what is the theory of liability? Is it a products liability claim against Google? An agency claim against the owner of the vehicle? Very interesting questions, but each misses the larger question: when driverless cars - that is, machine operated, safer cars - replace human operated cars, and the number of motor vehicle accidents are significantly reduced (a good impact of technology), what will happen to the 20% share of the docket currently occupied by motor vehicle accidents?

Simple: the percentage of motor vehicle accident cases will plummet. And with that extinction, so will arrive the loss of one of our largest practice areas. We will have too many lawyers and too little work.

We lawyers should take the idea of this paper - that technology will eliminate problems that lawyers once solved - as a governing principle of our approach to our practices: what are the vanishing markets (likely more than motor vehicle personal injury claims, but this paper will not explore them).

We should then consider what new problems will arise, because its axiomatic that one problem solved usually creates two more.

Attorney Kriesen is the founder and principal of The Kalon Law Firm, LLC. He has been practicing law as a trial lawyer for over twenty years. He holds a Juris Doctor from The University of Connecticut School of Law.

Copyright Christopher P. Kriesen

November 18, 2018