The ideas presented by the British jurist Richard Susskind in Tomorrow’s Lawyer, the first edition of which dates from 2013, may still sound a little extravagant, perhaps even bold for today’s legal market. Is it really?

Susskind presents no less than sixteen sources of legal services for the market that is built on technology. We have highlighted seven below that may, in a way, make up the recruitment list of the world’s leading law firms at this very moment.

They are:

1- The Legal Knowledge Engineer: In charge of determining the procedures and standardization that will be incorporated into the computerized system. They will do the distillation of the legal content and data (mainly from the Open Justice movement) that will be automated and more than that, how it will be automated.

2- The Legal Technologist: They are basically the managers of the technological platforms, acting as a kind of web manager, with knowledge of the practice of law and systems engineering and technology management.

3-The Legal Hybrid: These are multidisciplinary professionals, acting as organisational psychologists, business consultants, commercial advisors or even accountants.

4- The Legal Process Analyst: This is the professional who will identify the portions of the service that may be broken down and delegated to third parties. This is the person who will analyse the breakdown of the service already mentioned in this summary (document analysis, legal research, Open Justice management, etc.).

5- The Legal Project Manager: After the service decomposition is performed by the Legal Process Analyst, it is up to this professional to allocate the tasks to appropriate providers. He/she deals not only with the choice of teams to perform each task, but also supervises their compliance and advises. It is analogous to a production manager in a factory. Susskind coined the term “Legal Supply-Chain Management” as the main task of the Legal Project Manager.

6- Legal Data Scientist: responsible for capturing and analysing data, identifying correlations, trends, patterns in both legal and general statistics. This requires a background in mathematics and programming.

7- The Legal Risk Manager: the work of these professionals is more focused on avoiding legal problems than on solving them. Therefore, they take preventive action through data analytics and risk analysis.

Until recently, these positions were not even considered in the legal environment. It is worth remembering that the force of innovation is as inexorable as the course of water: there is no point stopping it. Somehow it will find its way. Similarly, it is the connection between law and technology. A perfect symbiosis, that is, a close, harmonic and productive functional relationship between two distinct organisms interacting actively for mutual benefit. And, certainly, the professional who gathers some of the above skills will survive in the natural selection that is already underway.