Legal technology of tomorrowTransforming the LawBy Professor Richard SusskindOxford University Press, 19.95Peter RouseIf you didn't catch Richard Susskind's first book, The Future of the Law, have no fear - the highlights are reproduced here, several times.

But what Professor Susskind has to say is undoubtedly of great importance and perhaps deserves repetition.Professor Susskind has strong views and ideals regarding the future of the law.

His passion and optimism shine through his writings and make him a compelling advocate.

For readers unfamiliar with IT, its salient functions and their place in the big picture can be easily understood.

The best example of this is 'The Grid'.The Grid breaks the law and use of technology into four categories: basic office systems; internal knowledge management systems; technology that allows clients to look at their files; and lastly, on-line services.There can be few practices left without systems in the first category.

Those without access to systems fulfilling some or all of the others are suffering from what Susskind calls 'the technology lag'.

But 94% of law firms in England and Wales have ten partners or fewer.

How are they to bridge this 'technology lag'?The whole thrust of Professor Susskind's vision is one of investment in technology.

Developing Web-based services is a costly exercise and one that only larger firms can afford.

Regrettably, there are few clues given as to how the rest of the profession are supposed to take their place in the future.According to Professor Susskind, the bell tolls for firms that fail to embrace on-line services.

This can only be relevant, if at all, to the world's leading 250 firms.

The message of doom is of course predicated on the future that Professor Susskind himself predicts.

But if you are not in a big firm, don't despair; there is still a wealth of valuable information and insight here.The answer may lie in the various government initiatives in which he is involved.

Making the resulting technologies available to the profession at large is a nettle that must be grasped if the government's vision is not to be undermined by the profession's practical inability, not unwillingness, to invest sufficiently.Professor Susskind is passionate about the right of citizens to have ready access to basic legal information in an easily digestible form.

He has a dream - one in which there is a clear divide between on-line service and human 'advisory' service.

In the on-line world, information and advice will be delivered by expert systems and perhaps one day justice will be done on-line through use of artificial intelligence expert systems emulating today's judges.

Much of what lawyers do, he says, can be commoditised, that is, reduced to standard forms and processes delivered on-line.

To meet the demand for such products, lawyers should become 'legal information engineers'.The author's interest in expert systems has, no doubt, allowed him to keep a disrespectful distance from lawyers.

He demonstrates a refreshingly iconoclastic attitude towards the profession and is apparently frustrated by its general fear of change.

This attitude allows him objectivity and a distinctly unemotional view of what lawyers do and so could do better with technology.Unfortunately, the message is still that the future of the law and legal services is on the whole better entrusted to machines than to lawyers.

Though he may be proved right, Professor Susskind is bound to suffer from the general scepticism as to the true role of technology that prevails in the wake of the downfall of on-line shopping and the continued dominance of real shopping.The other factor, of course, is that few lawyers have clients willing or able to pursue their own on-line legal problem-solving.

Are people really going to hand over management of their affairs to smart machines? Is there not another way of unlocking the latent legal services market that Professor Susskind identifies and which undoubtedly exists? One gets the impression that there must be a 'third way', that would encourage adoption of 'constructive technologies' to enhance and promote traditional service and service values, not by-pass them.

The challenge is to find the right balance.Surely technology should be used to do all those things that practitioners know to be a chore but cannot avoid, such as finding the right law for analysis, saving and retrieving precedents, and getting accurate bills out and paid on time.

These are things that technology has already evolved to address and make easier, as is access to such technology.What then of lawyers? Lawyers possess intelligence vastly superior to the artificial kind.

We are trained to take an objective view of a client's circumstances and work with that client to find a solution.

This requires rational, intuitive, communication and relationship skills that no machine can hope to emulate (and heaven help us all if such machines ever come into being).

Better justice and better business will be attained when better access can be had to those better equipped to help - that is surely a worthy cause that technology should be harnessed to serve.There is still so much that can and should be done, through education as well as use of technology.

Government has a huge role to play and the UK's e-government initiatives are essential to the general process of change to which Professor Susskind draws attention and the concurrent debate to which he undoubtedly makes an invaluable contribution.Solicitor Peter Rouse is chief executive of Geodesia, a business providing Web-based collaborative solutions for professional firms.