Abstract
Uber and Airbnb signify new ways of working and doing business by facilitating direct access to providers through new digitalised platforms. The gig economy is also beginning to percolate into legal practice through what is colloquially known as NewLaw. Eschewing plush offices, permanent staff and the rigidity of time billing, NewLaw offers cheaper services to clients in order to compete more effectively with traditional law firms. For individual lawyers, autonomy, flexibility, a balanced life, wellbeing and even happiness are claimed to be the benefits. The downside appears to be that NewLaw favours senior and experienced lawyers while disproportionately impacting on recent graduates. This article draws on interviews with lawyers in Australian and English NewLaw firms in order to evaluate the pros and cons of NewLaw.
Highlights
In the late twentieth century, the neoliberal imperative—with its emphasis on cutting costs to maximise profits—saw a general move away from full-time permanent work to casualisation. This trend was boosted by the ‘gig economy’, which emerged from the global financial crisis of 2008–09.4 The gig economy entails the traditional employment relationship being fragmented into ‘short term, intermittent work for multiple engagers (“gigs”)’
It appears we are on the cusp of a gig economy in the practice of law, which is reflected in innovative pathways, collectively known as ‘NewLaw’
Working for a fixed fee was believed to contribute to individual well-being but to greater productivity: ‘We find lawyers who predominantly work fixed-fee, have better work–life balance and they’re more productive and they end up being the top billers in the law firm’ [Manager, Aus., Female, 22 March 2018]
Summary
In the late twentieth century, the neoliberal imperative—with its emphasis on cutting costs to maximise profits—saw a general move away from full-time permanent work to casualisation. It appears we are on the cusp of a gig economy in the practice of law, which is reflected in innovative pathways, collectively known as ‘NewLaw’ This imprecise descriptor is attributed to Eric Chin, who claims to have coined it as recently as 2013 to describe a business model in which labour arbitrage (taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets) is used in the delivery of legal services such as ‘legal process outsourcing firms, lawyer secondment firms and fixed fees service firms that leverage on demand lawyers’.9. I was interested in why lawyers had left traditional practice, established a new firm or had chosen to become independent contractors, and what working flexibly meant for them, how comfortable they were with the technology and what measures were being undertaken to prevent work from encroaching on their private life. The study documents the positive experiences of practitioners, women lawyers, with the caveat that the prospects for young lawyers appear less than rosy
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