Rebecca Haw Allensworth (Vanderbilt Law) argues that the legal services regulatory scheme perversely both over- and under-regulates the legal services marketplace – licensing too few lawyers on the front end and then, on the back end, taking insufficient steps to ensure adequate quality. According to Allensworth, the current system of lawyer regulation bars nonlawyer providers from the system and simultaneously shunts the lowest-quality lawyers into the system’s lower precincts, where the consequences of poor representation are most sharply felt. Allensworth’s lightning bolt of a chapter shows that the challenge of regulatory reform is not just opening the system to new providers but also rethinking how to allocate – and police – the providers already there.

America’s market for legal technology presents a puzzle. On the one hand, America’s market for legal services is among the most tightly regulated in the world, suggesting infertile ground for a legal technology revolution. On the other side of this puzzle is America’s advanced and free-wheeling market for legal tech, which is likely the most robust in the world. This chapter explains this seeming puzzle and then uses that explanation to make some predictions about where legal technology will continue to flourish in America and where legacy players—lawyers, law schools, and judges—will instead stymie its development. In order to predict the future we first must understand the present and the past, so the chapter presents a brief overview of lawyer regulation, the structure of the American market for lawyers and legal services, and the current state of legal tech. This more granular view of the innovation ecosystem can explain why some tech sectors are booming, while others remain stubbornly behind, and also where we’ll see continued and even accelerated legal tech growth and where we won’t.