Stampede to Extinction?
by Charles F. Robinson
Law Offices of Charles F. Robinson
Clearwater, Florida
Email: cfr@charlierobinsonfuturist.com
Copyright © 1999 Charles F. Robinson

Our profession faces quantum change. I hope we can help teach each section member and every Florida Bar member how to get ready for the years to come. I believe lawyers are like the great buffalo of the 1800s, locked in a stampede for extinction. Is the cliff two years away or five? Those in the middle of the herd will not survive, because they won't be able to turn unless they start to move now. Those on the edges may have an option to change direction. Even those with the physical ability to avoid the cliff will have to understand that the cliff is close in order to understand the need to change direction. I believe that at least six out of 10 American lawyers will go over the cliff.

I see the stampede image for several reasons. Increased competition within and outside the profession is accelerating rapidly. AARP has essentially standardized fees for routine legal work. AARP members know that the organization has screened the approved lawyers, provided training and provides ongoing support and CLE. They know there is an 800 number to call if there is anything wrong with the service provided. There are 33 million AARP members, and someone in America becomes eligible for membership every seven seconds by turning 50. In the test states, a large number of lawyers has applied for AARP approval, and the average experience of those selected is 20 years of practice.

Over 70 percent of the domestic relations cases in our county are pro se on at least one side. You can throw away the lawyers weapon, The Rules of Civil Procedure.

American Express Investors Services is now one of the top 10 CPA firms in the U.S. They have been buying up CPA practices to offer totally integrated planning services. They are a baby step away from hiring in-house lawyers to complete the package. (In-house lawyers may not be necessary; however, since they can find lawyers to do document drafting at such low cost that some services may well stay out-sourced.)

Merrill Lynch now offers a program called Retirement Management Service. For $500 per year, a Merrill customer can have a medical insurance claims service, a 24-hour hot-line on health and retirement issues with an RN available to handle health questions. In addition, consultations on estate planning and insurance are included, along with discounts on prescription drugs and long-term care insurance premiums.

If you don't have a little knot in the pit of your stomach concerning the future of your estate planning practice, consider yourself in the center of the buffalo herd.

Most lawyers are risk identifiers, not risk takers. Our training in stare decisis (precedent) makes many believe that you can only find the future by studying the past. We walk through life backwards. Identifying risk may not be a high value need now or in the future. Jennifer James, an urban cultural anthropologist, includes bar associations along with the American Medical Association and others as lodge cultures in her book Thinking in the Future Tense, (1996, Simon and Schuster). A lodge culture enforces and maintains a nostalgic and unrealistic view of life and work. She describes lodges as a cooperative alliance in which the members bond together for power or protection or both. Lodges often do poorly during periods of rapid change because they are rarely visionary. Without significant transformation they go out of business.

Compare doctors, lawyers and CPAs in the last 10 years.

Our health care system has gone through major change in the last five years. Our doctor clients tell us they are working harder for substantially less income, and doctor-patient relationships are at an all-time low. Major change in the health care system was inevitable, yet the medical profession has yet to make one proposal for change to the system. Jennifer James believes that no profession in history has lost so much standing in such a short period of time absent revolution.

Technology makes the average 1040 income tax return a very simple undertaking for many taxpayers. If a taxpayer keeps up-to-date information with a program such as Quicken, it is hard to find the accountants role in the process. Many banks and brokerages encourage customers to use their on-line services through the Internet. Looks like another lodge headed for the dinosaur pit, right? Not so. The leadership of the Florida Institute of Certified Public Accountants (FICPA) formed the Visioning 2000 Task Force in 1989 and followed with a Re-Visioning 2000 Task Force in 1995, according to the June 1997 issue of Florida CPA Today. The task forces were commissioned to look to the future to allow CPAs to remain competitive in a marketplace going through quantum change. The focus of the task force proposals was to unshackle CPAs from rules based on a manufacturing economy to allow freedom to compete in an economy driven by technology, information and services. The CPAs wanted to compete at many levels in providing financial services while maintaining the professions reputation for integrity, independence and objectivity. They lobbied for legislation which essentially allows a CPA to sell financial products, to receive commission splits and even to sell part of the practice to non-CPAs. It passed the Florida House and Senate unanimously and takes effect October 1, 1997.

Where can we find visionary activity in The Florida Bar or American Bar Association leadership? Where is the Visioning 2000 Task Force in the organized bar? Do we really believe that UPL activities are protecting our profession from competition from outside the profession? Instead of a task force on the future, we set up task forces devoted to nostalgia for the past. Do we really train those in our ranks without scruples or manners to change their ways through professionalism task forces? Compare The Bars attitude to the CPA leaderships attitude. Which group is more likely to survive?

On the other hand, the judiciary in Florida has seen the handwriting on the wall. The Legislature made it clear some years ago that there would be no blank checkbook for expansion of the judiciary. Computerized case management systems appeared in chambers long before The Bar heard of case management software. Our Sixth Circuit, under the leadership of Court Administrator Bill Lockhart, is nationally known for its leadership in technology. Florida Supreme Court Justice Ben Overton is leading the judiciary into the 21st century. JOSHUA, the Florida Supreme Court web site, is a model for others to follow. Judge Earl Zehmer of the First District Court of Appeal led the efforts to electronically link all of the Florida appellate courts. Second District Judge Jerry Parker took over that responsibility after Judge Zehmer's death.

Ten years ago, I would have recommended psychiatric help for anyone suggesting that Americas lawyers would be passed by the CPAs and the judiciary. Such predictions would have been as ludicrous as the possibility of the removal of the Berlin wall or the breakup of the USSR.

The Florida Supreme Court is committed to public access. Don't be too surprised to see JOSHUA provide citizens a choice of documents and pleadings to prepare. What would you like to do today? Update your will? Probate a simple estate? Start a dissolution of your marriage? The first list will include those documents and pleadings the Supreme Court mandated the Young Lawyers Division and several substantive Florida Bar sections to provide the public. The Internet visitor will be given a checklist to fill in on-line, and when the checklist is completed, the visitor will be able to save and print the documents on a computer at home or on one of the computers provided to the public at the courthouse.

Which approach to the future will we follow? The Florida Bar, the Florida Judiciary or the CPAs? Law firms traditionally have been structured more like civic clubs than businesses. Lawyers take on management and marketing as menial tasks to share, rather than opportunities to lead. We have rewarded the technicians in firms while the entrepreneurs tend to fly solo. I don't believe lawyers feel safe unless they are doing client work.

The lawyer market was probably saturated in the mid 1980s, yet we produce 36,000 graduates a year in the USA. There is no time to learn the practice at a reasonable pace because law school debt- often $60,000 or higher-along with impossible billing requirements, crush the new lawyer, forcing her to forego opportunities to see our profession at its best. Where is the time for professional development, networking, volunteer work and other personal growth opportunities that make us more professional lawyers who are concerned about meeting clients' needs and expectations?

Technology should help us be more effective in doing our work, communicating with clients and meeting their needs. We need to be up-to-date. If you don't have computers with Windows 95, Jennifer James believes you should wear a sign that says, "I am obsolete." (Thinking in the Future Tense, Simon and Schuster, 1996) With color printers widely available for well under $500, why do we plod along in black and white? The old Courier font makes reading the documents we prepare difficult. Why don't we change it? Jim Taylor, senior vice president for global marketing at Gateway 2000, says, "Complaining that technology changes fast is like complaining that rocks are hard."

At Gateway, they talk with 100,000 people a day, including those who are shopping, ordering or getting tech support. Their web site gets 1.1 million hits per day. The time it takes for an idea to enter the organization, get processed and go back to customers for feedback is only minutes. Gateway is designed for speed and feedback. How would your practice and mine change if they were devoted to speed, feedback and immediate action?

The Internet will change our world as much as the invention of the printing press changed the world 500 years ago. Those of us who see technology as an opportunity will change the way we do business, redefine our roles with our customers- and prosper. By the way, we will be changing our roles constantly if we plan to do well.

Boundaries are disappearing. Half of all marriages end in divorce. The new family more closely resembles the sitcom Friends than it does

Father Knows Best or Leave it to Beaver. Tax planning now includes planning for citizenship as a steady stream of U.S. citizens willingly become citizens of a country they do not consider home.

The workplace is changing as well. The ex-military types who formerly dominated the legal administrators' domain are almost gone. Lawyers have pioneered one area that the business world has now followed enthusiastically- company disloyalty. Lawyers have been mobile for some time now, and any vestige of loyalty is out from the beginning of practice. The first job is a training experience for a new lawyer and his trainer. Promises of lifetime employment for top performance are empty promises. We can sigh for the "good old days" when a lawyer could start and finish with the same organization, but the chances are even worse that the lawyer will start and finish with the same spouse.

We should feel liberated by these changes, not resentful. Tom Peters suggests that everyone needs to rewrite his personal resume at least quarterly to review skills learned during the last three months. If there is nothing to add to your resume, you have stopped growing.

It is important to listen to today's thinkers for guidance, but there is great wisdom to draw from the past. The following, for instance:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live in our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps the independence of solitude. — Emerson, Self-Reliance

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