Small firms will paradoxically be able to out-maneuver these behemoths, though, to capture all but the largest pieces of business. On-line filing, litigation by Webcast, instant access to pooled data, documents, and legal research over the Web, will allow even a sole practitioner to work out of his streamside house in Gunnison and compete with the big boys and girls on 17th Street. Trials will become, even more than they are now, the exception rather than the rule. Already, nearly 90 percent of all civil cases in Colorado are settled or dropped before trial. In the next hundred years, expect this trend to approach 100 percent.
Trials are already too costly, and their results too unpredictable.
While litigants will still use lawyers, fewer of them will use the courts. Instead of getting the case after a year or so in court, and tens of thousands of dollars wasted, these ADR entrepreneurs will grab the case from the beginning, becoming court substitutes. Even how we settle cases will change. Huge databases of civil cases and their outcomes will be available to litigants and their lawyers. In seconds, they will see a predicted dollar settlement range for their case based on a detailed analysis of every other similar case in the database.