The richest corporations want their legal work mass-produced and custom-fit. Big firms accommodate these clients by exploiting economies of scale. The deep bench supplies apprentices to do drudge work for their mentors, and many specialists packed under one roof cross-pollinate their ideas, as at interdisciplinary research universities or think tanks.

I believe that Eben believes that the efficient trade in information will abolish the ownership of symbolic representations, materially, and then legally. Then the brokers and networkers of creative thought will become obsolete. Blogs broke the media conglomerate’s monopoly on distributing news. Recording companies will go the way of switchboard operators. Middle Management is being crushed by flattening corporate hierarchies. The continental investment banks ceded power to an archipelago of hedge funds, run by irreverent geniuses like my three college classmates who started trading currencies together as second semester seniors.

By gambling on their own hedge fund over a hierarchical bank, perhaps these friends were selling short our industry too. Perhaps the same centrifugal force will disintegrate giant law firms. Certainly, raw jurisprudential data will be free one day, perhaps when some Robin Hood scans in the entire written Westlaw and Nexis registers, then writes a Google-like algorithm to organize it into Wikipedia-like linked pages. Lone-practitioner Davids will keep pace with firm Goliaths by outsourcing drudgework to India or their cell phone.

But creativity will never be socialized, at least until someone invents mind-reading or artificial intelligence. Hedge fund managers will still struggle to predict capital flow from commercial data; managers will market and innovate; blogs will rely on reporters to formulate questions, anticipate the scene of the crime, and research non-symbolic facts; good musicians will always smoke pot and drop acid.

So what is essential to legal services, and what structure and scale will generate it most efficiently?