'Legal freegans' are looking to 'eat your lunch': advanced technologies and nonlawyer entities are encroaching on the traditional practice of law.

In the 1880s, a group of experts was asked about New York City's future. While the prognosticators correctly predicted the city's population would swell exponentially, they concluded New York would become uninhabitable due to the waste generated by more than six million horses the city would need. The impact of the internal combustion engine and electricity was not taken into consideration.

When the Vision 2016's Technology Group sat down at the Bar's Winter Meeting in Orlando, Chair John Stewart told that story (taken from Jeff Stibel's 2013 book Breakpoint and discussed in an article by William & Mary law Professor Frederic Lederer in the January/February issue of The Bencher) as a parable of the difficulties in discerning how emerging technologies and other trends will affect the future practice of law.

Nevertheless, the 68 members of the Bar's Vision 2016 commission continue their three-year mission to identify the challenges that lie ahead for the profession and to set out a framework for meeting them. In addition to technology, the commission is also focusing on the future of legal education, Bar admissions, and the delivery of pro bono/legal services.

Bar President Eugene Pettis said the commission will spend the next six months collecting information and educating themselves on the issues at hand.

"It is important that if we are truly going to shape the future and be the architects of our future, we are learned in the subject matters we are going to address," Pettis said.

Jay Cohen, the commission's administrator, asked the four subgroups to spend the afternoon narrowing their focuses to three to five key issues each. (See story, page 5.)

Jordon Furlong, a Canadian lawyer and consultant to law firms on strategic and tactical issues with Edge International, told the Technology Group the biggest issues the profession will face in the next three to five years include:

* Technology that performs a legal or lawyer function.

* Online dispute resolution.

* Technology assisted review.

Companies entering the legal market, including Legal Zoom and Rocket Lawyer, can draft, in a matter of minutes, "airtight, top-notch contracts," pulled together without the use of a lawyer, he said.

"They are really not doing anything that a law firm could not be doing right now, as well, or frankly could have begun doing five years ago," Furlong said.

But that's just the beginning, as more powerful and sophisticated technologies start pouring into the legal marketplace.

"Software," Furlong said, "can answer straightforward legal or regulatory or compliance questions without the involvement of a lawyer."

One such company is Neota Logic, which Furlong said is already being used by law students at Georgetown and some large law firms.

On its website, Neota Logic touts itself as able to deliver knowledge in an operationally useful form as expert systems that can be consulted interactively online or embedded directly in business systems.

"We transform expertise into answers and action in law, compliance, risk management, accounting, human resources, environmental regulation, medicine...