anecdotally, this is where the famous lack of modern skills comes from in engineering culture. If you keep doing the same things you've been doing, you'll look around one day and see that everyone has moved on.

The market for simple SMB websites is a great example. This went from custom HTML+webservices, to Wordpress, and now to WIX/shopify/square. I'd bet the market for SMB marketing will similarly move to near plug+play google/FB offerings.

However if you started out making websites in 1993, then there are a vast array of products and services one could move into over the last 3 decades.

I think this really depends on what kind of firm you're talking about. You could make the same case for contractors i.e. "billable hours are king". Take the example where you need to paint a house. You could hire someone off the street who does it with a paintbrush and rollers or hire a pro with a sprayer and prep knowledge to do it in 1/4 the time and with 10x the quality.

In this context automation could be a tool that a law firm uses to enhance the quality of their product. Personally, I would pay more for a tech-savvy law firm that embraces automation, not less.

I think it has more to do with having an adversarial law system. It doesn’t matter what new tool you come up with in the arms race. Your competitor will soon have it as well.

A'la Ethereum's smart contracts?

Code isn't flexible enough to work for laymen. It feels like you need to be a developer and a lawyer to make a smart contract work as intended.

Maybe that works against my earlier premise, but I don't think that this is the way we want to go.