The future of the lawyer’s profession

Any report is better than no report at all, we have to concede. Please do not misunderstand: I have the greatest of respect for my two peers who took on this perilous task. What is striking, however, is the complacent certainty that the world of lawyers cannot be reformed without strong, authoritarian action. Action, that is, on the part of the Ministry that commissioned the report. What will 21st century lawyers be? Digital, of course! That is the revolution that lies before us, we are told. Incidentally, lawyers will no longer be legal experts. They will be ‘expert managers of data with legal impact.’ A university entrant hoping to become a lawyer will be given vocational training. After all, a lawyer fresh from university needs to meet the demands of the market. Since lawyers are to be trained for the job in advance, universities will become responsible for part of their traineeships. Apparently this is because law firms no longer have time to train new lawyers. And, above all, because they no longer want to. It cuts into their profits. So they will do what they have always done: shift responsibility to society. The rapporteurs claim it is possible to study law in three years, which leaves two years for the budding lawyers to prepare themselves for the ruthless competition in the outside world. And, yes, it is perfectly possible to reduce the time needed for a law degree, if we assume that taking minor subjects in other areas of culture is a pure waste of time for the standardised lawyer of the future dependent on artificial intelligence. The latter, we are assured, is the be all and end all of our lawyer 2.0.

At this point we realise that the value of this report is in its omissions. It eschews any discussion of the reasons why our society needs lawyers and will continue to do so in the decades to come. What a feat: to claim to be showing lawyers the way forward without stopping for a moment to ask what lawyers in the present or future are actually for. Or considering the role of the law itself in societies where the rule of law is beginning to crumble.

The lawyer of the future will take on the world with an open mind, in a spirit of solidarity, intellectually equipped to grasp every aspect of this world groaning beneath the weight of an economic system that is becoming increasingly unacceptable, its consequences ever more disastrous. No mere lawyers, our counterparts in the future will be philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, economists... in short, they will be humanists. And courageous to boot. An ethic of courage will arm them in the fight against the disintegration of democracy, marked by the widening gulf between principles and practice, as the philosopher Cynthia Fleury claims. But what will prepare our future lawyer for this role? During my first years at university, I learned about Emmanuel Levinas’ concept of alterity; I discovered Heidegger and Sartre’s existentialism, no less than the ability to philosophise on the basis of lived experience; I learned from Freud to distinguish the pleasure principle from reality; and sociology classes taught me about the civil rights movement in the United States. The report’s proposal is quite the opposite: it will lock us up in the technocratic, competitive, one-dimensional system that is destroying our world! This is a system that questions neither its assumptions nor its expectations. We will end up no better than the very law firms that have reduced the lawyer’s profession to the level of a business model: optimised and profitable. It is the practices of these firms that are the real threat to our profession, for whom lawyers are service providers like any other.

Can’t we dream any bigger than this? That lawyers might work towards a better society, that all lawyers might embrace this lofty aim? Why is there one set of wealthy lawyers for the wealthy, and a separate set of lawyers for the poor, who are poor themselves? Is this summa divisio inescapable? Is it not possible to dream that, rather than imposing a single vision on everyone, we might do the opposite: teach everyone the meaning of citizenship and duty, by taking on the training of new lawyers, devoting some of our time to people without money who seek recourse to the law, to the homeless, to the victims of tragedy in our world? Of course this must not prevent bars from providing lawyers with the new, technological tools. But it is hard to suppress a smile when I read all these exhortations to update - after all, the bar is already bursting with countless plans.

Clearly, lawyers will continue to defend their clients, whether the two rapporteurs and the minister like it or not. That is precisely where their strength lies. This task is vital to society. Beyond that, they provide counsel and strategic advice. And they will continue to do so, more than ever, but only on the condition that they can preserve their humanist outlook, without being brainwashed by the law of the market. Moreover, this can only succeed if their partnership with their clients is not destroyed by the very anonymisation wrought by a competitive market. One final word: the future of lawyers is intrinsically linked to the future of justice itself. And all the political parties have been guilty of allowing justice to disintegrate over the last twenty years. The two rapporteurs to the Minister assume that there is no future in legal procedures. They have reason to do so. The state our justice system is in scares off the very people who need it. So how can justice be done? One thing is certain: it is a lack of resources that breeds a climate of impunity, which in turn threatens the rule of law. And if the rule of law is under threat, so is the legal profession itself.