Legal Practice and Digitalization

Abstract

The legal community broadly recognizes that it must respond to the continuing digitalization of the legal market and to the evolving processes of legal service production. Such responsiveness will, in turn, require an analogous transformation of legal education so that curricula and pedagogies become congruent with the profession’s impending evolution. The pressing empirical question is thus how the profession will enact this digital adaptation. This article nominates and elaborates three prospective trajectories that the legal profession might plausibly pursue. Each is grounded in contemporaneous sociological models of the profession’s structural dynamics and the legal market’s evolution, supplemented by diachronous accounts of the profession’s development over the last century. To ground these theoretical projections, the analysis will restrict itself to three comparable parliamentary democracies Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands linked by sufficient legal, cultural, and institutional similarities. The three proposed trajectories are characterized as non-mutually exclusive, permitting simultaneous or sequential pursuit within the profession. We will subsequently address our principal inquiry: in what manner must legal education evolve in order to respond to the digitalisation of the legal profession? In pursuit of this objective, we will delineate three prospective reforms in legal education, each aligned with distinct trajectories the profession may adopt in adjusting to the digitalisation of its marketplace and the generation of its primary output.