The American legal profession is at a critical inflection point, one that will likely result in dramatic changes in the ways in which consumers access legal guidance and the manner in which lawyers and others deliver it. Chat-enabled artificial intelligence, algorithmic decision-making, digitization, and commoditization threaten existing practices within the legal profession as it is currently constituted by making legal services and information easier to deliver, less expensive to provide, and less difficult for consumers to access. New technologies could lower the cost of legal services generally and make many forms of legal information easier to disseminate, and, as a result, more widely distributed. Because of this, more consumers are likely to gain access to some type or form of legal assistance, even if it does not mean they will necessarily receive the direct services of a lawyer. It likely also means that the traditional methods by which legal services have been delivered will become obsolete in at least some contexts, and with that, many traditional legal services jobs and careers as well. This will, of course, have a dramatic impact on what lawyers do, who delivers services that look like legal services, what law students learn, and what law schools teach. Much could easily be lost as guidance to address legal problems is digitized, commoditized, and delivered in accessible and affordable ways, just not by lawyers. At critical inflection points in the American legal profession’s history, it has responded to demands from within and outside the profession to address the ways in which the profession was not serving its appropriate functions in society and failing to uphold what should be its values. At one of the more significant of these inflection points, which occurred in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, the profession went through dramatic change: moving it from what I call the profession’s “first wave,” where a loosely organized bar made up almost exclusively of white men of Northern European descent faced few barriers to entry to the profession, to its “second wave,” when the profession erected significant barriers to entry and institutionalized such barriers in an effort to maintain greater control over the practice of law. I argue here that we are on the cusp of what may be a new “wave”—a third wave—where technology impacts the practice of law and the ways in which consumers access legal assistance in dramatic ways. But to change for the sake of change alone is not a good enough reason to applaud the coming disruptions in the delivery of legal services due to new technologies. Any profession promotes a set of professional values and serves a particular role in society. The legal profession, like any profession, should serve its appropriate role in society; it should fulfill its purpose. A critical question for the profession, and society at large, is whether new technologies undermine that role or advance it. What is lost and what is gained with respect to the values the profession is supposed to uphold and those functions it is supposed to fill when new technologies might displace traditional modes of delivering legal services? To answer these questions, one must first conduct an assessment of the values and functions of the American legal profession. Once such an assessment is complete, one can embark upon a broader effort, one that reviews the ways in which new technologies are being deployed, and will be deployed in the future, and calibrate such uses in ways that advance a purpose-driven legal services model in a technology-enhanced legal ecosystem. What I hope to accomplish in this essay is to lay out the parameters of the debate around the coming disruptions to the delivery of legal services due to emerging technologies and identify the considerations that should go into any assessment of the proper role that the legal profession should play in the wake of this current inflection point
