Law and Baseball Have Much In Common

Both have operated as guilds for generations, are self-regulated, highly profitable and priced beyond the reach of most potential consumers, writes Mark Cohen in Forbes. “Baseball is exempt from antitrust laws because the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized it a sport, not a business. Law is regulated by lawyers that thwart competition, relying on the false pretense that it is solely a profession and not the huge business that it is. Both industries have had insular, self-perpetuating cultures. Each is becoming more specialized, competitive, global, and data-driven.” And each has new ‘players’ with new skill sets that are redefining the industry. Like baseball, law features a new breed of service delivery experts whose job is to deploy appropriate resources to optimize value. These legal operations professionals have business and technological expertise, and are playing increasingly pivotal roles in the legal industry. “This is creating cultural friction with practice-centric traditionalists for whom data analytics and other new skill sets are a threat to the traditional ‘brute force,’ labor-intensive partnership model now in its sunset.”