If you think of the gig economy, the chances are you think of the likes of Uber and Lyft, Deliveroo and Mechanical Turk.  Platforms offering relatively low skilled work with minimal job security and many of the bad things that have come to characterize the gig economy.

Except, as I highlighted in a recent article, that perception doesn’t really reflect reality.  A report from the Centre for Research on Self-Employment (CRSE) highlights how many of the 4.8 million self-employed people in the United Kingdom are in ‘project’ roles, which basically means work performed by highly skilled freelancers that has a clear and identifiable end point, with projects usually lasting for weeks or months. This contrasts with gig work that is usually the same task performed repeatedly for a specific client.

Given this context, a recent study exploring the role of online marketplaces in the legal profession is particularly interesting.  The study explores the Chinese market after the country’s Ministry of Justice made online legal services a key part of its strategy.

The study reveals that there are around 100 online platforms operating in the country for lawyers and other legal professionals to offer their services.  As with so many online platforms, practitioners range from those offering premium services for a high price to their more budget-oriented peers.

A gigging life

Whereas gig economy platforms like Uber have provided a ready supply of new work for thousands of drivers around the world, most legal professionals had plenty of work before the arrival of digital platforms, so the study aims to explore some of the motivations for joining what appears to be an environment that worsens their working conditions.

The study revealed that nearly all of the lawyers on the platforms were individual rather than corporate lawyers, with participants tending to fall into one of two groups: entry-level lawyers who lack the experience and contacts to find work in more traditional means, and lawyers operating in less developed parts of the country where there was not sufficient demand for legal services.  In other words, they’re professionals who were struggling to find sufficient work at the lower end of the legal market.

Apart from that, the motivations of gig workers were not significantly different to those in other professions.  Participants regularly cited flexibility as a key attraction, as was the ability to earn supplementary income in addition to offline work that nearly always remained the priority.  Online work helped to flatten out demand due to the unstable nature of their offline portfolios.

New ways of working

The nature of platform-based working also resulted in some significant changes to work practices, not least of which was the challenges presented by one’s online ratings.  This contributed to professionals being pressured to please clients, even when it went against their professional judgement.

This can present particular problems when it runs counter to the law, but the importance of ratings to the lawyers livelihood renders the client king in the relationship.  This resulted in some lawyers admitting that they had altered advice to clients when they felt they were unhappy, despite this violating their ethics.  This could be exacerbated by the virtual nature of the relationships, which created a relatively low trust base to work from.

As the clients were typically of low income and low education, their knowledge of the law was often minimal too, which can exacerbate frustrations, as participants in the research explained how clients would often take out misunderstandings or frustrations with the law on the lawyers themselves.

Control was also exercised by the platforms themselves, with many imposing a range of service standards and disciplinary measures when these are not met.

Disrupting the market

While the likes of Uber have already had a considerable impact on the taxi industry, it’s fair to say that the legal marketplaces have had a minimal impact on the traditional, offline legal practices, not least because rather than cannibalising existing markets, they have opened up legal services to a much lower end of the market.  This is unleashing a demand that was previously untapped.

Will it always be thus and what might the implications be for the legal profession in the west?  While platforms have disrupted numerous professions in the west, the Chinese market has a number of unique elements to it that support the gig-based legal industry.  The sheer scale of the market is the biggest of these, with this breadth providing a big enough budget end of the market for online lawyers to thrive.

The government strategy to push legal services online has supported this growth, with the government highly influential in the way the legal profession operates.  What’s more, lawyers are also less prestigious than in western countries, and their lower income encourages greater degrees of entrepreneurialism as lawyers hustle for income.

These relatively unique conditions make similar markets emerging in the west unlikely, but in a world in which innovations are increasingly global in nature, it is almost inevitable that the legal profession will be influenced by changing technologies and customer expectations.  Whether this results in a similar emergence of platform-based legal services only time will tell.