world. Law firms today are lawyer-intensive, process-light operations; throughout this next decade, they'll become process-intensive, lawyer-light operations. Law schools are not the only stakeholder in this industry to be fundamentally misaligned with that future: legal publishers, CLE providers, and bar associations are likely to be the hardest-hit, because they all rely on "volume of lawyers" as the basis for their businesses. Conversely, legal technology suppliers and legal systems analysts should have a field day as they retrofit firms for leaner infrastructure and more mechanized operations. (Read my article on disruptive legal technologies if you'd like to refresh yourself as to what's coming.) Law firms wonder where the growth in the legal market has gone. But Toby Brown has answered that : growth is bypassing law firms and going instead to innovative new providers, few of which are law firms and hardly any of which employ lawyers in the usual way. Law firms are going to realize that in order to compete for this market growth, they will need to emulate the approach of these competitors, which invest heavily in systems and reserve lawyers for those tasks that truly require their intellectual heft and skilled judgment. The hard fact for lawyers to absorb is that those tasks are much fewer than our traditional law firm model supposed them to be. Many law firms believe their "expenses problem" is all about cutting costs to preserve profit in the face of declining revenue. It's not. It's a concrete sign of the growing misalignment