If you care (or worry) about the crunch-time that’s beginning in medicine, read this post last Tuesday on the Harvard Business Review blog:
Creative Destruction Visits the Legal Profession
It has strong echoes of what I wrote last month in As the crunch hits, will the best survive? That post talked about how much pain there’s likely to be as we try to solve the $750 billion of unnecessary spending in US medicine. Until now I wasn’t aware of how much the legal profession has been hit by changing realities. Items from the HBR post:
- “In the ten years or so since running that course, the assumptions underpinning a lot of the business models at law firms have come unraveled. Just as we argued, a lot of the lower-end, but profitable, work is now being done by cheaper providers or has been automated”
- “Legal budgets have come under intense scrutiny as the Great Recession’s aftermath grinds on.”
- “And — gasp — lawyers are now realizing that if nobody is looking after the business end of things — ahem — in other words, being strategic, the entire operation can come to a crashing halt. Witness the spectacular bankruptcy of once high-flying Dewey & LeBoeuf.”
Yeah, the bankruptcy of a once-high-flying law firm. More:
- “The problems started to become urgent when young lawyers, armed with freshly minted degrees, either couldn’t get legal jobs or, worse yet, couldn’t get jobs at all.” Only 55% percent of 2011 graduates had a law-related job nine months after graduation.
Imagine if only 55% of med school graduates could find a job. Can’t happen, right?
That’s at the low end. And at the top?