Fenwick, M., & Vermeulen, E. P. (2019). The Lawyer of the Future as “Transaction Engineer”: Digital Technologies and the Disruption of the Legal Profession. In Legal Tech, Smart Contracts and Blockchain (pp. 253-272). Springer, Singapore This chapter introduces two connected arguments about the future of the legal profession . First, the ongoing “digital revolution ” will continue…
Flattening the World of Legal Services? The Ethical and Liability Minefields of Offshoring Legal and Law-Related Services
This article examines offshore outsourcing of legal and law related services as the newest twist in the international market for legal services. We consider the impact of offshore outsourcing on the profession generally and analyse the ethical issues raised by offshore outsourcing, both as it exists today and as the practice may develop in the…
Making sense of professional enablers’ involvement in laundering organized crime proceeds and of their regulation
Money laundering has ascended the enforcement and criminological agenda in the course of this century, and has been accompanied by an increased focus on legal professionals as ‘enablers’ of crime. This article explores the dynamics of this enforcement, media and political agenda, and how the legal profession has responded in the UK and elsewhere, within…
The Evolution of Professionalism as a Mode of Regulation: Evidence from the United States
Opinion is divided on how far and in what ways professionalism as a mode of regulation has evolved. To date, attention has focused on the impact of neoliberal political and economic ideologies that challenge the idea that professions should be trusted to regulate themselves. This article further examines the impact of these attacks on professionalism…
Designing Just Solutions at Scale: Lawyerless Legal Services and Evidence-Based Regulation
Around the world, billions of people lack access to justice, often because they cannot access help in resolving their justice issues. An important reason for this is that many access models rely centrally on lawyers, and such models simply cannot scale. Some jurisdictions allow lawyerless legal services. We offer a new framework for understanding lawyerless…
Access to Justice and Legal Services Regulatory Reform
Researchers have launched a new era of studies exploring relationships between legal services regulation and access to justice. These scholarly developments respond to recent changes in how Anglo-American jurisdictions regulate the practice of law, changing who can make money from the practice of law, who can engage in it, and who can direct and control…
The impact of international lawyer organizations on lawyer regulation
Levin, L. C., Mather, L., & de Groot-van Leeuwen, L. (2018). The impact of international lawyer organizations on lawyer regulation. Fordham Int’l LJ, 42, 407. While much of the scholarly attention devoted to lawyer regulation focuses on state or national actors, the impact of international lawyer organizations has been largely ignored. Increasingly, however, a number of such…
Evidence-Based Lawyer Regulation
Chambliss, E. (2019). Evidence-Based Lawyer Regulation. Wash. UL Rev., 97, 297. The legal profession is losing its authority over the regulation of legal services. Recent changes in antitrust law have put state bar associations under a spotlight. Competition from technology companies and concerns about access to justice have increased political pressure for market liberalization. Independent research is…
Evidence-based promulgation: reconsidering the rulemaking process for rules of professional conduct
Much like the indomitable Pippi Longstocking, the legal profession has succeeded for decades in asserting its right to self-regulate. Judges play a key role in this regulatory regime, serving as both rulemakers and enforcers. Indeed, prompted by the efforts of the organized bar, the judiciary claims the inherent—and exclusive—right to regulate the practice of law…
Lawyer ethics for innovation
Law struggles to keep pace with innovation. Twenty-first century advancements like artificial intelligence, blockchain and data analytics are already in use by academic institutions, corporations, government entities, healthcare providers and others but many questions remain about individual autonomy, identity, privacy and security. even as new laws address known threats, future technology developments and process improvements…