About a month ago, Harvard Law School decided to reform its first-year curriculum—a slate of courses in use for over a century by just about every American law school. People thought that was a big deal, but it’s nothing whatever compared to what’s about to happen in the United Kingdom.

This past Thursday, Her Majesty’s Government introduced a bill to the House of Lords which would dramatically reform the legal profession in the UK. Most significantly, the bill would (1) create a majority-layperson “Legal Services Board” to regulate the legal profession throughout the Kingdom and (2) allow “Alternative Business Structures”—like banks, and some say maybe even supermarkets—to provide legal services even if nonlawyers are integrally involved. Also, the new Legal Services Board would have to listen to a panel of legal services consumers.

And this is not some spurious bill destined for obscurity. It is the result of years and years of in-depth review of the legal profession in the UK, which produced a series of reports calling for sweeping change. The 2005 culminating report, “The Future of Legal Services: Putting Consumers First” (841 KB PDF), opens diplomatically, saying things like:

The professional competence of lawyers is not in doubt. The calibre of many of our legal professionals is among the best in the world. But despite this, too many consumers are finding that they are not receiving a good or a fair deal.

But then it gets down to it:

[T]he current framework is out-dated, inflexible, over-complex and insufficiently accountable or transparent. . . . [T]he system ha[s] insufficient regard for the interests of the consumers.

And finally the Government reaches its core recommendation, a change overdue by hundreds of years: The interests of consumers, not lawyers, should drive decisions about regulating the legal profession.

I’ve talked to a couple Canadian lawyers about this over the past week, and we’ve all agreed that this will eventually be the future of the entire English-speaking bar, whether lawyers like it or not. And most probably won’t. See, e.g., the American Bar Association in 2000 when it killed off the similar “multidisciplinary practice” (MDP) idea.

In the meantime, I suppose we’ll all be watching the UK to see the chicken littles try to hold off the laity.