That’s the question at the heart of the 2021 Report on the State of the Legal Market from the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at the Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters Institute, with supporting data from Acritas and Peer Monitor.
The theme of this year’s report – almost inevitably – is whether the extraordinary year just past will prove to be an “important inflection point for the redesign of the delivery of legal services.” With a tip of the hate to Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book The Tipping Point, Georgetown senior fellow James W. Jones, lead author of the report, explores the question before concluding with a decidedly inconclusive “it remains to be seen.” “Of course,” Jones writes, “one can identify a tipping point with certainty only after it happens. But there are signs that the current moment may be different and that we may in the future look back on 2020 and 20231 as the time when serious change finally accelerated in the evolving market for legal services.”