“The future is already here,” Canadian science fiction writer William Gibson once said, “it’s just unevenly distributed.” That quotation was raised by Richard Susskind, renowned legal futurist and consultant  to law firms and legal organizations worldwide, during his special presentation at the Dublin CLC on Monday. Speaking to a packed house of lawyers and judges, Professor Susskind, a special adviser to the CBA, talked about the relentless shift of legal services towards systematized, packaged and potentially commoditized status.

Drawing upon insights from his recent widely read book, The End of Lawyers?, Professor Susskind painted a picture of a profession relentlessly being transformed by technology that will make legal services much easier to deliver — but also much less costly, and therefore less able to provide lawyers with the income streams they have previously enjoyed. Automation and collaboration are two routes by which innovation is changing how lawyers’ services are delivered, he said, and the legal profession must learn to adapt to these new realities as quickly as possible.

Among the ways in which the system will change will be the ongoing decomposition of legal tasks into component parts that can be delegated to various sources, few of them actual law firm lawyers. Professor Susskind identified 12 types of destinations for this multi-sourcing: in-sourcing, de-lawyering, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting, co-sourcing, leasing, home-sourcing, open-sourcing, computerizing and no-sourcing. The upshot of changes like these is that clients will have a broader range of options by which to access legal services — a development that could in turn have a profound effect on access to justice generally.