Disclaimer – I am a lawyer, though I am really a part owner of the business and technically not “practicing law” in the traditional sense.

Disclaimer 2 – The world of telecom agreements is a bit bizarre anyway, with lots of technical stuff, and the creaking legacy of a crumbling regulatory environment.

Clients increasingly seem to care more about clearer, shorter documents and lower costs. I think that these goals are entirely compatible, but they require both increased commoditisation to the extent possible, and better and more efficient technical drafting skills to the extent law cannot be commoditised.

It won’t be too long before anyone drafting lengthy, obscure, head-fugging prose in contracts at the leading edge of commercial law is going to find themselves out of a job. To a client, the “mystique of the profession” is something they have to tolerate, not something they respect. As soon as they find a lawyer who can make their life easy while delivering the same quality, they’ll move on without a second thought.

I’m also optimistic about change. On one side, we have order, in the form of MSCD; on the other, we have chaos. People will opt for order, although they may not get to enjoy its benefits until the Old Guard dies out. In that regard, I’m encouraged by the strong sales of MSCD.

I think of the drastic inconsistencies in English spelling. Once dictionaries were introduced in the mid 1600s, spelling started to stabilize, and by the 1800s most words had set spellings.

But I’m not suggesting that we’ll have to wait 150 years for progress! For one thing, I expect that document assembly will help propagate decent contract language more quickly than would be the case if we waited for the world to change one lawyer at a time.

Ken

We can’t come to a consensus on how to do these things if we’re all working towards conflicting ends. And, I can’t suggest how there’s an easy way to call these ‘mystique of the profession’ people out on their strategies (and I suspect some of them haven’t even consciously realized what they’re doing and why). Sadly, many of those people are also the ones pulling the strings in our law firms, so we sit and watch our profession frittering away its (very thin in the first place) goodwill with its public while others worry about their short-term profitability checks.

(Do you sense that I have little hope for fixing the circumstances you describe in any BigLaw (and even MidLaw) setting? It’s only likely to occur in those settings where like-minded lawyers have struck out on their own and determined as a matter of policy from the start that they aren’t going to fall into the old paradigm of using the same form of agreement that was used in 1963, and they’re going to be willing to sell their policy to their clients as a benefit. And, they need to be willing to cede the mystique and trust that people will still see value in their services even after the clientele can actually understand what it is that we do!)