Book reviews The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, by richard susskind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, xiv + 284 + (bibliography + index) 18pp (£24.99 hardback). ISBN 978-0-19-954172-0. There is a strange melancholy in Susskind’s latest book on technology and legal practice. The revolution foretold in The Future of Law, Susskind’s 1996 offering, has had 12 years to mature. The world has adapted to email and the internet; been liberated by Google; and irritated by and/or addicted to Facebook and Twitter. Still, a Brave New World of technologised professional services has not yet come to pass. We appear a long way still from a revolution in legal services. The reason for this melancholy is, as Susskind frankly puts it, in applying trans- formative technology to law, ‘success stories remain exceptional’. 1 This book is as much a story of the failures of technology as the potentiality of its successes. For those interested in the status quo, the failures may be comforting evidence of the resilience of traditional ideas of law and associated models of provision. For those who believe that technology and deregulation will lead to significant changes in the way that legal services are delivered, then the failures should give significant pause for thought. Susskind is a believer in the inevitability of radical change. For, ‘lawyers who cannot identify or develop the distinctive capabilities [of legal knowledge engi- neers] . . . I certainly do predict that their days are numbered’. 2 He predicts that lawyers, uncertain of the value of their core competence, will seek to broaden their appeal as market forces bite, and bite harder. Clients will demand more for less. The role of traditional legal experts will diminish and the roles of legal knowledge engi- neers expand. In particular, legal service, or rather those legal services which are susceptible to it, will travel along a chain of steps, from the traditional bespoke service (legal advice and assistance provided to clients in a unique way each time) to: • standardisation (check-listing the processes to be gone through, using standard text in documentation but still with an essentially individualistic adaptation to clients); • systemisation (this appears to be a degree of automisation of standardised processes and texts based on user (lawyer) inputs which enable quicker and more uniform delivery of, eg, banking documentation); • packaging (making available systems to clients, separating user and provider more profoundly); and, finally, • commoditisation (when packages are created by numerous providers and competition drives the price down to the minimum, even zero). Susskind points out the obvious resistances to systemised, packaged and commodi- tised services: charging hourly fees inhibit the developments of such services; sys- temisation is anathema to most lawyers; and, commoditisation yields little or no profit. He also points out that it just needs a handful of legal service providers to break rank for competitive forces to drive the bulk of susceptible legal services in the direction of systemisation and packaging in particular. 1. The End of Lawyers?, p 21. 2. Ibid, p 3. Legal Studies, Vol. 29 No. 4, December 2009, pp. 692–705 DOI: 10.1111/j.1748-121X.2009.00143.x © 2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation © 2009 The Society of Legal Scholars. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA