Learning to run

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Posted in: CLE, Law School, Talent

There’s an old expression among professional sports coaches: “You can’t teach speed.” It’s usually meant to indicate that there are things you can train athletes to do well (skills) and things that are simply God-given (raw talent), and it encourages the traditional view that talent is more valuable.

I’ve come to believe differently. In most markets, athletic and otherwise, there’s no shortage of talent: the physical and mental attributes of today’s new recruits surpass what most members of previous generations could boast. What’s missing, in many cases, are the skills, the knowledge of how to deploy those talents to maximum effect as a performer. Almost every good athlete coming out of high school and college can run fast; relatively few, however, learn to run well.

These thoughts came to me while reading (and commenting upon) an excellent post by UK law professor John Flood, in which he laments the complete disconnect between the legal education system and the rapidly evolving profession into which that system’s graduates will be deposited. If you asked your average law school professor to identify names like Axiom, Acculaw, Lawyers On Demand or any leading LPO, as John suggests, they wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

Law schools are so far behind the legal market’s evolutionary curve (and apparently so uninterested in catching up) that they seem extremely unlikely to lead conversations towards a better legal education and training system. But if so, where do we start fresh? I’d like to suggest that we begin by re-examining some fundamental assumptions about “talent” versus “skills” in the legal profession.

Virtually everyone in law school and the legal profession today has talent: some combination of raw intelligence, analytical and logical adeptness, and/or communication ability. That’s primarily thanks to the undergraduate education systems that produced these lawyers, the Law School Admissions Test that judges them, and the law school admission personnel who value these criteria head and shoulders above any others.

So the talent is there. Virtually everyone who’s in or preparing to enter the legal profession has speed. But not everyone in the legal profession can run well. And the newer you are, the more this is true. It’s almost universally the case for law students and new lawyers, in fact, who have received almost no training to help turn their talents into skills with which they can serve clients and make a living. (And I don’t just mean “practice” training; the tools with which you become a great lawyer include a really solid grounding in jurisprudence, legal history, and ethical philosophy, and not many law degrees can say they deliver that.)

Law schools haven’t been much help in this regard; but in fairness, it really wouldn’t have made much difference even had they spent the last 20 years teaching students “how to be lawyers.” That’s because the market for which those fantasy schools would have been preparing students is quickly disappearing. Nobody (not least me) can say with certainty what law practice in 2026 will look like, but it seems a pretty safe bet that it’s not going to look remotely like it did in 1996. Just as well, then, that we have mostly raw talent that doesn’t need to unlearn old habits before acquiring new ones.

But we still need someone to lead the way in the new skills-acquisition process for the legal profession — and that leads me to think there’s a huge market opportunity, right now, for a legal skills training company geared towards early 21st-century law practice. Never mind preparing students for Skadden or Linklaters; prepare them for Axiom, Lawyers On Demand, Clearspire, Quality Solicitors, Eversheds Legal, and similar operations that look like they’ll be offering an increasing percentage of legal jobs over the next couple of decades.

But — and this is important — we need to skill lawyers up, not down. We don’t want to be developing data entry clerks or automated-contract proofreaders here, and tomorrow’s best legal employers won’t be hiring those people. We need to train new lawyers in leadership, problem solving, project management, cultural fluency, emotional intelligence, technology, entrepreneurship, and other traits that have a decent shot at being the skills future lawyers will need. Give them the tools with which they can harness their talent and take it into any high-value or socially meaningful career, whether it involves the sale of legal services or not.

Law schools, as mentioned, might as well not be in this discussion. I don’t have a great deal of confidence in the practicing bar, either, especially given CLE administrators’ continued fondness for offering legal updates and calling it “professional development.” These are yesterday’s approaches; we need to find tomorrow’s. Solo Practice University remains a powerful model for this sort of innovation; we need more organizations interested in training lawyers to be gainfully and usefully engaged as lawyers in the decades to come. We need far greater use of true, supervised, mentor-based apprenticeship, because “doing” has a multiplier effect on “training.”

What we need, essentially, is a new breed of coaches who can deliver future-oriented professional development. There is no lack of opportunity awaiting them. There are thousands upon thousands of lawyers out there who can run fast but aren’t getting anywhere. They need someone to teach them how to run well.

Seen and (on one occasion) heard

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Posted in: Law21

Before launching into a roundup of what I’ve written elsewhere, I wanted to let you know that I’ll be in Chicago next week for a series of meetings, in particular the College of Law Practice Management‘s 2011 Futures Conference at the University of Chicago-Kent College of Law. In addition to presiding over the 2011 InnovAction Awards ceremony, I’ll be moderating a panel titled “Law Practice Without Borders,” with Simon Chester, BeiBei Que and my Edge International partner, Pam Woldow. If you’re in Chicago October 28-29, you should make time to attend the whole conference: it’s an extraordinary lineup of speakers and topics that you won’t find anywhere else.

On to the roundup: here’s a list of the articles I’ve written (and in one case, the conversation for which I was recorded) in the last several weeks.

Stem Legal’s Law Firm Web Strategy Blog:

Slaw:

The Lawyers Weekly:

Attorney At Work:

The Lawyer (UK):

CBA PracticeLink:

Freedom is The New Rich:

Edge International Review (Co-authored):

As always, I hope you enjoy reading these entries as much as I enjoyed writing them.

The franchised future of small law firms

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Posted in: Innovation, Solo & Small Firm

Today’s dispatch from England & Wales, the world’s legal laboratory, informs us of a new company called Evident Legal that is setting up the latest in a series of law firm franchises. Simplify the Law (STL) aims to create a national network of law firms with between 2 and 20 partners that serve both individual and commercial clients and produce annual revenue of between £2 and £10 million. STL figures there are about 440 firms throughout the UK that fit that definition and that could use the franchise’s help to “stand up against the brand-heavy big hitters,” as the company’s home page puts it. Quality of service and client communication will be STL’s primary selling points to the buying public, while solicitors are offered exclusive territory and marketing and branding support to draw them in.

Simplify The Law joins several other British companies that are setting up chains or franchises of sole practices and small law firms. Quality Solicitors (QS) was one of the first out of the gate — it describes itself as a collection of “the UK’s best law firms who have come together to create a national legal brand with locations nationwide.” Not precisely a franchise, QS already boasts well over 100 firms in its orbit and made a significant breakthrough earlier this year when it signed a deal to open kiosks in 150 WH Smith bookstores throughout Britain (with an eye on an eventual total of 500). These “Legal Access Points” represent a key approach of consumer-oriented franchises: go where the customer is and meet him or her on familiar ground.

Then there’s face2face solicitors (f2f), which specifically self-identifies as a franchise and, like other franchisors, offers small law firms the benefits to match, including IT infrastructure, case management, billing and collections support, time recording, IT backup and disaster recovery, and perhaps most importantly, centralized marketing and branding. f2f essentially promises to relieve franchisees of the burden of running their business so that they can focus on practising law. f2f focuses on smaller firms than STL or QS, targeting those with annual turnover of £1.5 million or less. As an example of the financial arrangements between law firm franchisors and franchisees, firms pay f2f a one-time fee of £25,000 and 8% of their annual income thereafter.

Other franchises like Lawyers2You and High Street Lawyer have already come out, and more will establish themselves in future. They are driven in part by the very difficult economy in the UK, but even more by the advent of Alternative Business Structures and the specter of massive chains like The Co-Operative getting into the consumer legal business through its banks and potentially its supermarkets. (Disclosure note here: STL has received business plan and start-up advice from Chris Bull, a partner of mine in Edge International).

There are at least two likely conclusions we can draw at this stage of the emergence of law firm franchises. The first is that this looks very much like the future of the small and solo law practice. The challenges facing small law firms these days — including downward price pressure, non-lawyer online competition, and the same range of business, technical and regulatory requirements that large firms can tackle with far more resources — will only be exacerbated by the difficult economic decade ahead. More ominously, solos in particular are older than average, are disproportionately based in smaller, stagnating or declining populations, and have few younger practitioners to whom their practices can be passed. New lawyers who might otherwise welcome the chance to hang out a shingle are discouraged by heavy debt loads, a lack of business experience, and the well-known risks of running a small enterprise.

Franchises are in a position to counter many of those concerns. They promise to take away the hassles of billing and marketing and file management. They provide the security of a branded name and logo and the advertising budgets to go with them. In some cases, they even provide training and a degree of knowledge management that all franchisees can take advantage of. Those are the kinds of lifelines that existing practices need and the kind of safety nets that could attract new practitioners by reducing their startup risks. Franchisors figure, probably correctly, that the same lure of reliable, secure, well-known brands can draw not just clients but also lawyers into their orbits.

There are potential downsides, to be sure. One of the reasons that marketing is so important to a law firm is that it forces the lawyer to give some real thought to identifying his or her personal and professional attributes and scanning the marketplace to determine the clients he or she should be targeting; it’s not something to be outsourced lightly. Taking the financial side of a law practice out of a lawyer’s sight can lead to taking it out of the lawyer’s mind; there are great risks to a small business whose owner is too distant and disconnected from cash flow and other daily financial realities. And any lawyer who practises franchise law will tell you that relationships historically between franchisors and franchisees have been, shall we say, a little fraught. But the pros of this sort of arrangement appear to give the cons a good run for their money.

The second observation is that this trend is by no means limited to the UK. The challenges facing solos and small firms in Britain are scarcely different from those bearing down on similar practices in the US, Canada and elsewhere. Solos value their independence, but they also recognize that the flip side of independence is isolation, and they know the harsh reality that if you start to sink, no one’s going to extend a hand to catch you. The benefits of franchising look intriguing no matter which side of the pond you’re standing on. (I recall, back in the mid-1990s, an attempted national law firm franchise called First American Law that wasn’t able to gain traction outside its native Florida; but it might simply have been ahead of its time in both market and, more importantly, technology and connectivity terms.)

Significantly, to my way of thinking, franchises also represent a way to bring in outside non-lawyer support to small firms in North America without running afoul of the rules on non-lawyer ownership of law firms. ABSs are now legal in the UK (although thanks to hangups with certification at the Solicitors Regulation Authority, only one conveyancing firm has so far received ABS approval). ABSs might eventually expand globally enough that US authorities will need to respond; alternatively, the Jacoby & Meyers lawsuit could be the powder keg that blows it all apart. But assuming that non-lawyer ownership restrictions remain in place in the US for the foreseeable future, franchises could be an alternative to outright non-lawyer control that still manages to give small firms an infusion of well-financed professional business support.

I still believe that solos and small firms have a bright future — brighter, in many ways, than most of the national and international giants whose business models are too archaic to survive a new century and too rigid to allow adaptation to new market demands. Small law firms, far more than big ones, can be financially and systematically structured with the kind of client focus that will be required for survival in the years to come. When I speak to law students — as I did again just last week — I advise them to plan their future legal careers as if they’ll be solos, because the skills they’ll acquire in that process will serve them regardess of their eventual work lives, and because it really is pretty great being your own boss.

But increasingly, the future for solos and small firms need not exclusively be the free-wheeling, fully independent entrepreneur of yesterday and today. In the long run, large consumer chains will be allowed to sell at least basic legal services in all major jurisdictions, and the challenges facing solos and small firms at that point will be similar to what your local variety store faced when Wal-Mart moved into town.

A number of small firms — not all, by any means, but more than a mere handful — will become part of a branded chain or franchise with centralized marketing, management and administration. These solos will find themselves in a franchised suburban or shopping center law office, or operating a purely virtual firm from home under a centralized brand. In the new legal marketplace, there will be worse places to wind up.

Jordan Furlong delivers dynamic and thought-provoking presentations to law firms and legal organizations throughout North America on how to survive and profit from the extraordinary changes underway in the legal services marketplace. He is a partner with Edge International and a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises.