I was thrilled and honoured today when I opened the Times legal supplement, to see that Richard Susskind had written about my web-site www.landlordlaw.co.uk and this blog in his regular column in the Times, available here on the internet.
For those who have not heard of him, Richard Susskind is an academic and expert on legal technology. He regularly advises national governments and large legal firms, and has been IT Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England since 1998.
He is also an author and has written widely on legal IT. His book Transforming the Law was an enormous inspiration to me at the time I was setting up my online service Landlord-Law in 2001. To find someone of Richard’s stature writing about the very same thing I was contemplating, gave me courage and underlined my belief in what I was doing.
One idea he is particularly well known for is “The Grid”, a model explaining the relationships between various fundamental concepts, including knowledge management, information systems, information technology and e-commerce (you can download a power point presentation on the grid here). Landlord-Law sits squarely in the top right hand corner of the grid, possibly a rather lonely position at present, but one which will no doubt become more crowded as time goes by.
Richard is a true visionary and I am sure that most if not all of his predictions will come to pass, if not now, at least at some stage in the future. With the enormous changes brought about by the internet at the start of this new twenty-first century, it is inevitable that the provision of legal services will also have to change. In its small way, my online service Landlord-Law is following one of the paths predicted by Richard, and showing that it is possible to succeed in a new method of legal delivery (even if you are a sole practitioner!).
