Unbound

Unbound: How Entrepreneurship is Dramatically Transforming Legal Services Today is a timely and relevant new book for anyone tracking emerging trends in the legal profession.

Wasting no time, the opening paragraph dives right in with observations we've been discussing for the better part of this year:

"The financial and economic crisis of 2008 delivered the final blow to any skeptics still resisting change in the legal industry. The legal industry is now rushing toward dramatic transformation. Change is long overdue... Over the next three to five years, the legal landscape will be dramatically reshaped. Law will continue on its global march. Even small firms are outsourcing legal support work overseas."

Author David Galbenski founded Lumen Legal, a legal staffing and consulting company, in 1993. His fifteen years as a legal consultant has informed his identification of a number of major trends that he believes will affect the legal industry in the coming few years. Some of those trends are:

• New ways to buy legal services. Consumer demands will force the legal industry to behave less like a profession and more like a business.

• New ways to provide legal services. Globalization is a force that will expand the ways in which legal services are provided to the end consumer.

• New ways to organize legal services. Tasks will become unbundled, as a result of both business pressures and globalization.

• New categories and types of people will be called upon to perform legal services.

Unbound underscores many of the opinions in Richard Susskind's The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services.

Additional quotes from the Financial Times' review of Unbound:

"The highlight of the book is a series of interviews with leading general counsel, who explain the changing global landscape their companies operate in and the pressures in-house lawyers face to rein in costs since the economic collapse. Their observations are stark and should raise the hairs on the arm of every managing partner, group practice leader and legal marketing expert in the business."

"The legal industry is facing unprecedented change, and law firms that don't modify the way they run their businesses face extinction."

"Law firms may be coping with a downturn in business by trimming their costs, but the recession is moving the entire industry toward a range of new, entrepreneurial models that will eventually put the legal industry more in line with other types of businesses."