What does the future hold? 'Wal-Mart efficiency with Neiman Marcus feel'.

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The practice of law is destined to become more commoditized and competitive in the years ahead, and a lawyer's understanding of the nonlegal parts of a client's problem will often be more critical than his or her legal understanding.

"It's what will set a given lawyer off as special," Thomas Morgan, a law professor from George Washington University, told the Board of Governors and the Young Lawyers Division board at their recent joint Palm Beach meeting.

There will also be fewer jobs for lawyers.

Firms will still exist, and some will be big, but, Morgan said, more will stay--or become--small and will partner as needed with others throughout the state, the nation, and the world.

Lawyers also will find themselves working on nonlegal as well as legal questions and will bill based more nearly on "value added," which also will raise independence issues to new levels.

The lawyers who succeed will combine "Wal-Mart efficiency with Neiman Marcus feel," said Professor Morgan, who teaches antitrust law and professional responsibility at GWU and is the former law dean at Emory University.

For a century or more, what it meant to be a lawyer seemed fairly stable, but in reality, the dynamics of the profession have been slowly changing for the past 40 years and have become increasingly more noticeable since the recession.

"First is that lawyers no longer make the rules governing lawyers, or at least we don't exclusively do it," said Morgan, noting federal and state courts have assumed jurisdiction to annul traditional rules.

As examples, he said for many years, it was unethical to engage in group legal services or for lawyers to advertise. But those prohibitions have all fallen by the wayside, as have minimum fee schedules, as courts have held that attorneys operate in the commercial world, which has been exacerbated by the quadrupling in the number of lawyers since 1970.

There are now 1.2 million lawyers in the U.S., about 1 million of whom practice.

"It makes it harder to know each other," Morgan said.

"The reason we didn't see that growth and experience as a challenge up to now is the growth in legal business can be most readily tracked according to the amount of economic activity in the country," said Morgan, noting if there was a 4 percent growth in GDP, a corresponding 4 percent increase in the number of lawyers could be absorbed.

Not so when the economy tanks.

In 2008, when the country saw a 4 percent increase in the number...