No one can pretend to have mastery over anything other than small parts of our legal system. And yet every one of us, under the law, is taken to have knowledge of all legal provisions that affect us. Given that most citizens do not know most of the law and cannot afford to obtain legal advice, we seem to be in a rather parlous state.

The problem comes sharply into focus when people contemplate taking an action through the courts. From a lay perspective, as well as appearing to be unaffordable, the courts seem to be excessively time-consuming, unjustifiably combative, and inexplicably steeped in opaque procedure and language.

Better access to justice should embrace improvements not just to dispute resolution, but also to dispute containment, dispute avoidance, and legal health promotion.

Often non-lawyers may not know that they are in a situation in which there is a legal problem to be resolved, contained, avoided, or that there is some benefit to be secured. Paradoxically, it seems you need to be a lawyer to know if and when you would benefit from legal help.

I do not believe that conventional lawyers in traditional law firms are always the best placed or most affordable sources of guidance for clients. A major and urgent social challenge is to find new ways of providing legal help, not least to citizens and to small businesses.

An alternative to the provision of legal help by lawyers is for skilled and often voluntary non-lawyers to advise people on their problems, rights, and responsibilities. In the UK, for instance, the Citizens Advice service does precisely this but it too suffers from lack of resources.

Another option is to provide citizens and businesses with online legal resources so that they can take care of some of their legal affairs on their own; or, when guidance is needed, they can work more efficiently with their legal advisers. If we can have in England, NHS Direct, an online service that provides medical guidance, why not have something similar for law?

In a recent study, the Oxford Internet Institute established that 73% of the British population are online and that 57% had used a government service in the past year. The remaining 27% are, of course, important, but only about one fifth of them "definitely don't know" someone who could assist them; a smaller percentage than is often supposed.

IT will continue to assist non-lawyers to recognise that they might benefit from some kind of legal input. One approach will be for people to register their social and working interests and for legal alerts to be delivered automatically to them when there are new laws or changes in old law. Another tack will be online triage — when a citizen has a grievance of some sort, a simple online diagnostic system could ask a series of questions, require some boxes to be ticked, and could then identify if the user has a legal issue, and if so, of what sort.

In many dimensions of our social and working lives, legal rules will be embedded in our systems and processes. Non-lawyers will no longer have to worry about recognizing when legal input is required.

A final use of IT will be through "communities of legal experience", so that people will learn of legal issues that affect them, not formally through notification by their lawyers, but informally, through social networks.

IT will play a role in helping select lawyers and other sources of guidance. There will be online reputation systems, not unlike those services that offer collective feedback on hotels and restaurants, to provide insight from others into their experiences with law firms and lawyers. There will also be price comparison systems, which will allow non-lawyers to assess the respective prices of competing legal providers. And there will be auctions for legal services—not generally for complex bespoke work but for the routine and repetitive work that will be sourced in various ways in the future.

Increasingly people will turn for basic guidance, on procedural and substantive issues, not to lawyers but to online legal services. We already use so much online information in our daily lives that there is no reason why legal help should not be similarly accessed. Equally, users will turn to the Internet for the production of standard documents, such as basic wills and landlord and tenant agreements and to communities.

Another possibility is online dispute resolution — for example, e-mediation and e-negotiation — for resolving differences.

Although I speak of many of these systems as belonging to the future, there are already innumerable examples of operational online legal services. In the words of William Gibson, the science fiction writer, "The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet."

This is an extract from Richard Susskind's book Tomorrow's Lawyers, published by Oxford University Press. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846