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Change Is Coming Fast (!)

By Matthew A. (Matt) Cordell

“The only constant in life is change.”  So wrote Heraclitus about 2,500 years ago on a papyrus roll using a stylus dipped in ink. Time has proven him correct.

Although change was a very real part of life during the era of Heraclitus, change in our lifetime is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, observed that the pace of technological change in the microchip processor industry seemed to be doubling every year, and he predicted that the trend would continue. Now known as “Moore’s Law,” his statement is often applied more generally to all technology: It is said that the rate of technological change doubles yearly. Other aspects of life, including societal values and international commerce, are also changing with extraordinary speed.

While we all understand that the law typically lags behind technological and social changes, the law and the legal profession are nonetheless changing at an increasingly rapid pace. The sheer size and scope of law grows daily as regulatory agencies promulgate thousands of pages of new rules and guidance (80,260 pages published in the Federal Register alone in 2015, according to the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University) and hundreds of courts and agencies create new precedent. As the law becomes exponentially more complex and changes ever more rapidly, lawyers (and the growing industries that complement or compete with lawyers to provide legal services) must evolve … and they are.

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