Game-changer

Review by Nick Beddows, CEO and Creative Director at Arcobaleno Media, UK.

Summary

Chrissie Lightfoot’s done it again. Her first book, The Naked Lawyer shook the legal world out of its cosy torpor. It spoke to the more progressive lawyers and gave them the tools to develop their client focussed practices in the world of social and digital media, harnessing lawyerly activities with emotional intelligence.

With her follow up book, Tomorrow’s Naked Lawyer, she’s gone further, envisaging the future of law in a world dominated by developments in AI and robotics. Chrissie’s USP is that she doesn’t just aggregate and summarise the present and probable future of law in a changing world, she actively engages in it and offers practical advice and resources to enable like-minded legal professionals to succeed in this brave new world.

Overview

With the ever increasing use of technology-based applications in the legal services market, it would be easy for Chrissie Lightfoot to simply write a user guide and leave lawyers to get on with coping in a changing world. She goes far, far beyond that. She captures the present with a lawyer’s grasp of detail and not only makes confident predictions about how technology, AI and robotics are going to affect the future world of law, she provides a roadmap of how to navigate to a successful tomorrow.

She embraces technology from a legal services perspective and this is crucial. This isn’t a generalist dystopian vision, it’s a practical manual for developing your professional life rooted in the nuts and bolts of law but looking at the stars. I’ve worked with lawyers and the legal services industry for many years so it’s the fact that it’s rooted in the everyday language and activity of the legal world and how it relates to the client that makes her approach so engaging and relevant.

She takes you on a journey from the fragmenting, rapidly changing landscape of today’s ‘law law land’ to a possible future where lawyers and technology co-exist to provide more effective and more efficient client-focussed services.

As with her first book, The Naked Lawyer, she doesn’t just describe the environment, she details it, defines it with pertinent and witty examples and case studies and provides ‘after dark’ activities to engage, explore and embed the concepts experienced in each chapter.

She knows her stuff. She’s spoken with the game-changers in the market, the futurists who not only predict change in the world but describe how it will affect us in the legal services market and all other transactions in our fast changing world from legal services to other older transactions, of the more naked kind.

If you’re looking for an easy read on the beach or an instruction manual, then this probably isn’t for you but if you’re searching for something that’ll inform you, entertain you and stretch your thinking to make you a better future legal professional, then this is the one book you must take with you on the journey.

Nick Beddows, Arcobaleno Media

Nick is the CEO and Creative Director at Arcobaleno Media. He spent 10 years at The BBC, eventually running his own TV series and producing and directing several high profile productions. He then co-created the award winning media unit at The College of Law, producing high quality online learning for students, trainee lawyers and senior partners, developing a deep understanding of how we learn intuitively through interaction and learning design. Nick was recently ‘Highly Commended’ at FT Legal Innovation Awards, May 2015, for an elearning course he wrote and designed for Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co.