The law firm has evolved from a compartmentalized, fluid business unit to a professionally managed corporate entity.

However, there still exists a gap between the domain expertise available with Lawyers in the lawfirm and its managers.

Every module predicted of the future law firm assumes that this bifurcation will continue, and that services will continue to be delivered piecemeal.

It is increasingly evident however, that management knowledge is transferable to lawyers and where combined, dramatically improves firm performance

As we thus move towards a convergent delivery model, where multi skilled professionals deliver answers to legal needs, work in all practice areas will get increasingly standardized, documented and engineered along established management best practice. Where law firms have faced competition from companies, such as in Conveyancing and Personal Injury, this trend is starkly evident.

Those firms who move first to implement this trend will lead the market.

As work is standardized, documented and engineered, the gray area between secretarial work and legal work gets bridged, and only work which requires the innovative application of legal knowledge remains classified as legal work.

With increasing cost pressures, the more a firm restricts its solicitors to deliver legal work, the better it would perform.

Coupled with the need to de-skill work, and to allocate resources appropriately, law firms face a changing communication paradigm.

Law firms have realized the necessity of moving to a decentralized communication approach, where a request for information is quickly acted on and responded to. However, the degree of IT expenditure required in co-coordinating the desperate strands of communication places an excessive burden on medium and small sized law firms. As a result, communication is often conflicting and discordant.

We see the future shaping up to allow small and medium practices access to low priced, centrally managed systems of communication. These can be Call Centers, or in house solutions such as low price licensed CRM.

As the flow of communication becomes systematized, there is ever greater flexibility in how roles are defined, how work flows are set up and the time period over which transactional work is delivered will shrink rapidly.

The firm of the future is thus a controlled domain where skills are segmented, delivery is segmented; communication flows freely, and is monitored, coordinated and updated in centralized warehouses that feed into workflows.

These management level changes will radically change service delivery. Managing client expectations of personalized service and single ownership of their transaction would be difficult. However, these challenges can only be dealt with by further documenting & standardizing work, by further using mechanisms to control and record communication and thus, by further freeing up Solicitors to focus on marketing and relationship building activities.