Four years ago, the SRA Handbook was 648 pages long. It contained all sorts of processes, restrictions and obligations that had grown up over many years. Some of these processes cost those we regulate time and money to comply with and pay for. Others cost us, and therefore the profession, to process. Many added little in making sure that the priorities of regulation – the rule of law and public protection – were supported. At the same time the rulebook restricted how solicitors could practise. There had been small relaxations from a prescriptive model based on traditional lawyer partnerships. But fundamentally practising law was unchanged – we could even call it artisanal and craft-based.

Speed in adapting to change and in improving your main products/services is of the utmost importance. As Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg of Google note in their book How Google Works: “Product development has become a faster, more flexible process, where radically better products don’t stand on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed.”

Blockchain. It’s been branded as the future of just about everything, and is soon expected to infiltrate all aspects of how we live our lives from banking, to tax returns to voting. But what is it, and how can it be used in property transactions?

It’s slightly tongue-in-cheek, but let’s see if we can design a business model that is doomed to struggle and which will ensure that we miss out on the profit and cash opportunities that come with providing high-value services at high prices in a near-monopoly situation.

Welcome to the new-look Legal Futures, refreshed and redesigned to be mobile optimised. We have run enough stories highlighting the importance of mobile optimisation, and we are finally practising what we preach.