The WSJ reports that doctors increasingly working for hospitals, which are becoming “consolidated health-care providers,” rather than for themselves. Doctors don’t want to have the burdens of ownership, and hospitals want to lock in customers for their expensive facilities.
While doctors are reconfiguring into medical technology intermediaries, lawyers are clinging to their age-old model of one lawyer advising one client. Technology is less important to lawyers than to doctors, but scale economies, intellectual property and other business considerations are common to both fields. How long until lawyers follow doctors into the 21st century business world?