February 2000 

Out On a Limb --
The Future of the Practice

by Wood R. Foster Jr.

In this, my first "real" column of the new millennium (how many of you read my President’s column in the January Directory issue?), I’ll go all the way out to the end of the limb and give you my "best shot" predictions on what the future holds in store for Minnesota lawyers.

It’s a little pointless for me to push my predictions too far out; in the various focus groups I have held with lawyers in the past year, I have found that lawyers generally have been reluctant to visualize the profession’s future. Any attempt to do so normally turns into a discussion of current problems.

My predictions are tailored to about a 10- or 15- year period -- as far out as I can even imagine at this time. I have the benefit of knowing, of course, that no one (except possibly me) will "check" on the accuracy of my predictions 15 years hence. So here goes:

1. Four law schools in Minnesota will be a short-lived phenomenon. In five years or less, Minnesota will revert to three law schools, due either to the demise of one law school or a merger.

2. Legal education will experience an increasing crisis as the speaking and writing skills of entering students decline. Law schools will be forced to offer remedial writing programs.

3. The number of lawyers in Minnesota will not continue to grow at its present rate. The expanding body of lawyers in Minnesota will begin to taper off in ten years, because by the year 2010, the number of lawyers retiring will begin to match the number of new lawyers. We should level off at about 30,000 lawyers.

4. Law firms will begin to devise "poison pills" and other disincentives to free-agency defections by star lawyers. Despite these efforts, the practice of law will become increasingly portable. "One-firm career" lawyers will be the exception, not the norm.

5. Multidisciplinary practice will remain a long way off in Minnesota (and elsewhere). Proposals for sweeping change will be resisted and eventually replaced with "toe dipping" experiments, including relaxation of the rule against nonlawyer partners, as long as there is lawyer control.

6. The line between "profession" and "business" will continue to blur as lawyers seek ways to cash in on more than just their time. The next decade will see entrepreneurial efforts of many kinds that involve wholly-owned business subsidiaries of law firms.

7. Professionalism and civility will continue to trouble the profession, but lawyers during the next decade will sense that the problem is improving, rather than deteriorating. New lawyers in particular will take the lead in trying to rid the profession of its dark side.

8. Non-Metro lawyers will feel increasingly isolated and marginalized by the metro practice. Within a decade, however, we will see the reversal of that trend as a lawyer’s geographic location becomes less and less important by virtue of available technology. A lawyer in Isanti County will be as well-positioned to handle the legal affairs of a Twin Cities business as will a Hennepin or Ramsey County lawyer.

9. The "general practice of law" will become a memory. Non-metro lawyers will be forced to follow their metropolitan colleagues into more specialized practices. To offset this, they will affiliate in geographically diverse firms that are technologically connected.

10.As multi-state practices proliferate, there will be increasing pressure from Minnesota (and all other) lawyers to standardize state-by-state professional rules, procedural rules, and licensing requirements. However, no headway will be made in this area within the next decade.

11. "E-law" is closer than we think, and no one (right now) has a very good idea of what it will look like. Within the next five years, lawyers will be forced to confront difficult ethical and commercial issues raised by the practice of law over the Internet, and will be forced to reassess existing unauthorized practice statutes.

12. Legal secretaries will gradually be phased out, morphing into legal assistants as the clerical aspects of secretarial work are eliminated by electronic filing systems, voice recognition software, and a largely paperless practice, both in and out of court. Court reporters will disappear.

13. Trial lawyers seeking to enter politics will encounter increasing resistance as labeling someone a "trial lawyer" becomes a political attack strategy. This will be very noticeable over the next three to five years, then it will wane.

14. Bioethics will replace abortion as a hot button political issue both locally and nationally. Privacy issues will run a close second. Both will spawn extensive litigation for a long time to come.

15. Intellectual property law will become a growth industry as bioengineering reaches out in directions we can only imagine. Demand for dual-degree IP lawyers will exceed supply.

16. Employee benefit law will grow substantially as pension and welfare plans struggle to handle an aging population. As normal life expectancies exceed 90 years (which will happen sooner than we think), a myriad of new legal issues will confront us.

17. Efforts to achieve racial diversity will continue to challenge the Minnesota legal community over the next decade. The glass ceiling will unfortunately remain largely in place, though women who "stay the course" will find greater equity of power and pay.

18. MSBA’s lawyers and judges will continue to earn their national reputation as leaders in professional innovation and problem solving, as well as quality of practice. Minnesota lawyers will continue to insist upon and nurture a compassionate system of justice, at least as compared to other states.

Wood R. Foster Jr. is president of the Minnesota State Bar Association. A partner in the firm of Siegel, Brill, Greupner, Duffy & Foster, PA, he concentrates his practice in commercial litigation and class action. He is a graduate of Amherst College (1965) and of the University of Michigan Law School (1968).