Enter: The Liminal Age of Legal
Design Your Delta No. 1
Our quest started with a simple question: How do we describe, succinctly and meaningfully, this collectively profound moment in the legal profession? A moment when we’re experiencing an intense level of inquiry and discourse around disruptive change across the entire spectrum of the legal industry.
Peruse the Google search results and you’ll find that no segment of the industry seems immune to some form of disruption, a condition existing long before the COVID pandemic and most certainly hastened and intensified by it.
Well into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we’re feeling the intense pressure of rapidly-advancing technology, an increasingly global economy, the demand for radically different business models and ways of delivering legal services, as well as a growing body of data acknowledging that our profession struggles with wellness, fails to meet the majority of justice needs in the U.S, and must reckon with its stunning lack of diversity. While not an exhaustive list, this is A LOT to process and negotiate.
As we dug deeper, parsing out the defining characteristics of this moment, we had an epiphany. This collective experience can be named, and with a single word: liminal.
The concept of liminality enters our modern lexicon first in Rites of Passage (1909), a volume by ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, and was used to describe those in-between spaces humans across cultures experience as we pass from one stage of being into the next, such as from childhood through adolescence and into adulthood.
The application of the liminal space has since expanded to describe social and cultural change, extending beyond the individual experience into a communal experience of great change and evolution.
“Liminality is a universal concept: cultures and human lives cannot exist without moments of transition, and those brief and important spaces where we live through the in-between.”
Bjørn Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern
Our entire industry is undergoing a rapid (and to some, painful) transition period. Veritably overflowing with ambiguity and uncertainty. The normal limits, which we’ve accorded absolute deference for over a century, are falling as more and more of us question the adequacies of existing structures and systems—most of which are products of the Second Industrial Revolution, a time that ended more than 100 years ago—down to the traditional rituals we’ve obediently observed seemingly without question.
The Liminal Age gives us both an understanding of this time in which we find ourselves, and permission to move on from the past to create a future that more fully embraces all of the opportunity we have to #makelawbetter. Leveraging all of the opportunities afforded by the vast scale, scope, speed, and complexity of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
What if, instead of clinging to a time that has passed, we embraced this Liminal Age of Legal? Recognizing the opportunity to carry forward that which may continue to serve us well while at the same time creating new, different, and better ways of doing and being. In this Liminal Age, we focus on AND, not or.
So, what does any of this have to do with the Delta Model, you ask? Everything. By acknowledging and understanding our liminality—the transitional space in which we currently exist—we seek to create ways of designing the future, including tools by which we can collectively and individually construct new ways of doing and being as legal professionals.
“Liminality is a form of holding the tension between one space and another. It is in these transitional moments of our lives that authentic transformation can happen. Otherwise, it is just business as usual and an eternally boring, status quo existence.”
Richard Rohr, Oneing: Liminal Space
We stand at the threshold of a new era for the legal profession, one that will be shaped by the many passionate people who choose to lead us through this passage and into the next stage of our evolution. It is up to us to decide how we navigate the Liminal Age of Legal.
Onward!
1 March 2021