ARE HAPPIER LAWYERS, CHEAPER LEGAL FEES ON THE HORIZON? Glenn Reynolds, our beneficent Insta-host, reviews the new book, Glass Half Full: The Decline And Rebirth of the Legal Profession by Ben Barton, Glenn’s fellow University of Tennessee law professor, who has also been guest-posting here this week, in his latest USA Today column:

[W]hile technology is hurting firms’ income, it’s also cutting their expenses, and making life easier (in some ways) for solo practitioners. I have a former student who practices family law and doesn’t even keep an office. Her clients like it that she makes house calls, and she saves big on overhead. Email, voicemail and the like are better than a secretary, and online legal research is better than maintaining a law library.

Clients, meanwhile, will get cheaper legal services. There’s a limit to how much lawyers can cut their rates — those student loan debts have to be paid, and if you can’t make enough to pay them practicing law, you’re better off doing something else — but many tech startups are looking at ways to provide legal services more cheaply and efficiently than the old model ever did. Barton is optimistic about that, and I hope he’s right.

At any rate, law, as the ultimate white-collar job, is now undergoing what so many other fields have suffered before: Technological unemployment and a shrinking economic pie. Lawyers, who probably didn’t shed a lot of tears when this happened to linotype operators, will just have to deal with it as well. I hope that Ben Barton’s mostly-cheerful predictions turn out to be right.

Read the whole thing, to coin an Instaphrase.