Comment
Contributors
Two books of note have just been published by veteran lawyers – The Inside Counsel Revolution: Resolving the Partner-Guardian Tension by former GE legal head Ben Heineman and The Future of the In-House Lawyer: The General Counsel Revolution, a collection of essays edited by Carillion’s Richard Tapp. The common ground is obvious in charting the wresting of power and resource over the last 25 years from law firm to corporate legal teams.
While much play is made of change in the profession – judged against the mid-1990s, the law firm model and the wider profession have not evolved to anything like the degree often claimed. You can easily trace precedents for non-law firm providers and contract lawyers back to the 1970s and 1990s while technology use has just tracked wider changes in society. But the steady rise of in-house counsel is a genuine shift in the profession’s tectonic plates. Strictly speaking, since its origins date back as far as the late 1970s in the US, it has been more evolution but its significance is nevertheless profound, in part because the process shows no sign of stopping.
