Opinion #12 - 5 years from now (2/3)

Welcome everyone!

A couple of days ago I posted my opinions on some of the aspects of the practice of law that some understand are going to change in the next few years. It all goes back to this tweet:

a. More specialisation: I am not sure if this should be a subject of the "future" of the legal practice because the market has been specialised for a long time now. I, for instance, have no clue about litigation, criminal or family law. Because I have never had the need to learn, and I can tell that a lot of my colleagues have been through the same situation, at least in big law;

b. Alternative Dispute Resolution: this is a trend that no matter what practice you are in, you have had to see the evolution of this. Because of the collapse of the judicial systems basically everywhere and the low sophistication of come jurisdictions, parties have decide more and more to submit all disputes to an arbitration procedure, specially in complex cross-border litigations. This has been proven to speed up the process. Additionally, we are beginning to find in some contracts dispute resolution procedures of an even earlier stage such as amicable negotiations or mediation. This will become market practice in a few years because of the lower legal fees and the speed of the resolution procedure. However, solutions are yet to be found on the enforceability of non-arbitral awards;

c. Non-lawyer firms ownership: this topic is very interesting and I will try to do a separate post about it. Not only because venture capital firms are starting to enter as equity non-practicing partners (specially financing the expansion) of law firms, but also because of some firms are starting to finance certain litigation proceedings in order to get a piece of the potential cake. This occurs specially with big class-actions where the judgment can amount to several hundred of millions of dollars in favor of the claimants.

I guess I will have to do a new post (probably tomorrow) in which I want to talk about how can the practice of law become "predictive", more available to all types of people and I will scrap the application of artificial intelligence.

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