Comprehensive study of the future practice of law underway.

We're not sure where we are going, but we are on our way.

Sounds like a punch line, but it was a recurring sentiment expressed by many of the 68-member Vision 2016 commission meeting together for the first time in Tampa in September to begin a three-year comprehensive study of the future practice of law.

Bar President Eugene Pettis said the legal profession is going through evolutionary changes, and it's the commission's job to identify the challenges that lie ahead and set out a framework for meeting them.

"We are getting ready to partake in what I think is one of the most important undertakings that our profession has faced in a long time," Pettis said. "Every one of us has felt the winds of change. What is the leadership going to do about the challenges the profession is facing?

"We can't miss the future."

To meet those challenges, Pettis has appointed Bar leaders to focus on four broad areas that will greatly impact how lawyers practice in the decades to come. President-elect Greg Coleman will chair the technology subcommittee; Board of Governors member Ray Abadin will study the future of legal education; BoG member Lanse Scriven will chair the Bar admissions subcommittee; and former BoG member Adele Stone will lead the review of the delivery of pro bono/ legal services. BoG member Jay Cohen will serve as the commission's administrator and former ABA President Martha Barnett will serve as special counsel.

"It is time that we looked to the future and participate as architects of solutions to the challenges that are inevitable," Pettis said. "That is leadership, and that is the only way we can ensure that the legal profession will maintain its core principles of providing public service, protecting rights, promoting professionalism, and pursuing justice."

To do nothing "is not a smart option," he said.

"I hope as we go through this process we will find some answers that you never even considered," Pettis said. "That's what this is designed to do."

To set the stage for the commission's work, Gerry Riskin, a Canadian lawyer, author, and management consultant who works all over the world, ran through a litany of the changes now on the legal landscape, including:

* Full-time law-related employment rates for law students nine months after graduation are about 55 percent and have dropped five straight years.

* The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts 28,000 new law graduate jobs opening each year for the next 10 years; law schools are on pace to graduate 44,000 lawyers per year in that same time.

* Firms now prefer to focus recruitment on experienced lateral partners with books of business; nobody wants unskilled new attorneys.

* Inter-jurisdictional mobility of lawyers is growing worldwide; reciprocity will soon become standard procedure.

* Bars and regulators will be obligated to re-examine standards for Bar admissions; a unified national test may soon emerge.

* Access to lawyers' services is increasingly available only to the rich, the corporate or industrial, the very poor, or the criminally charged; half to two-thirds of middle-income Americans' legal needs go unaddressed.

For the first time, Riskin said, lawyers have serious competition from nonlawyers and should no longer count on reflexive regulatory protection. In Australia and...