Face2Face is compared to and contrasted with another British operation, Quality Solicitors, which has been around for longer. Quality Solicitors is a network of about 200 independent law firms across the UK, ranging in size from solos to firms with more than 40 partners. Face2Face characterizes QS’s business model as one that rebrands existing firms, whereas its own model is “targeting start-ups, breakaways and firms looking to be ‘reconstructed,’ especially if there is a need to consider succession/exit.” In practice, the two models probably won’t come across much differently to clients; in both cases, they’ll see a small law firm with a franchised brand and the promises that come with it.

The UK, of course, is also home to the still-mythical “Tesco Law,” the widely mooted example of what the ABS provisions of the Legal Services Act would enable: legal services sold by supermarkets. This too would be a franchise operation, albeit with the franchised firms operating inside the mega-stores rather than in downtown or suburban storefronts. Canada has something similar with the “President’s Choice” line of banking and insurance services offered through Loblaw’s or the Great Canadian Superstore supermarket chains. (I enjoy telling US audiences that the Tesco Law equivalent in Canada would be “Loblaw’s Law”).

President’s Choice aside, however, the idea of franchise law firms hasn’t taken off in North America. I still remember the launch, back in the mid-1990s, of First American Law (not to be confused with First American Title Insurance or the First American Law Center), which planned to build a fleet of small branded firms across the US and Canada. Perhaps because it was ahead of its time, FAL didn’t take. The idea hasn’t gone away, though: Richard Granat recently floated the idea that LegalZoom might get into the same kind of business, supporting small firms with a brand and a back-office processing center.

The common thread in all these companies and concepts is this: a series of small firms, from solos up to about five lawyers but conceivably larger, operating independently but under a single brand name and supported by centralized web-based back-office support and marketing functions, serving consumers and some small businesses in heavy-traffic areas of law like family, real estate, wills, and business law. Because the work is what lawyers like to call “commoditized,” the brand becomes extremely important. Among the promises that QS firms make to their clients, for instance, are “no hidden costs,” “direct lawyer contact,” “same day response” and “the first consultation free.”

That’s one vision of the future. At the opposite end of the spectrum lie the global giants, and they’re taking a much different approach. Most of these firms dread the “commodity work” label and strive to serve a high-end market of major corporate clients with complex, challenging, high-stakes work that engages lawyers intellectually and rewards them stunningly. And while smaller firms are turning to a faceless brand to give them an edge, the larger firms are counting on faces, very specific ones, as their salvation.

The Wall Street Journal‘s recent report on lateral hiring trends was one of a growing number of accounts of law firms raiding rival firms for superstar partners with large books of business. These laterals don’t come cheap: many new arrivals expect compensation up to ten times heftier than what some of their new colleagues are earning. The compensation gap is to be expected, of course: just as LeBron James is paid a lot of money because he’s expected to fill a lot of seats, laterals are expected to earn their keep and more. But it’s still interesting to hear DLA Piper chairman Frank Burch explain the rationale behind lateral hires: “We are focused on making big, strategic hires, who can allow us to achieve greater stature and visibility in the business community.” That’s not a productivity argument; that’s a marketing argument, a profile-augmentation rationale.

None of this is new, of course: smaller firms that sell what everyone else is selling need to find a market differentiator (hence the interest in brands), while large firms want to sell services of a type or quality that no one else is selling and make that the differentiator. The question, at this stage, is which of these approaches makes more sense in the marketplace of the near future? It seems to me that going forward, the branded commodity approach actually has more upside.

I was speaking at a retreat for an AmLaw 100 firm last summer, and one of the lawyers asked me about what the future held for both “commodity” work and “bet-the-company” work. My response was that virtually every law firm mid-size and higher insists that it wants to pursue the latter kind of work, that that’s what it wants to be known for in the market. The problem, I said, is that there’s actually relatively little work of that kind available — companies don’t bet themselves every day — and thousands of law firms are all chasing it. Compare that to the “commodity” work: there’s tons of it out there and hardly anyone wants to provide it (indeed, judging from the number of self-represented consumer clients, there’s a massive shortage of supply). Which of these two areas looks more promising from a business development perspective?

The high end of the legal market is over-served and the low end is under-served, and there’s two reasons for that. One is that many lawyers don’t find the low-end work “challenging” enough (to which I say, find me a high-paid M&A superstar who can last a week in family court without breaking down). The other, of course, is that the low-end doesn’t pay enough. But I’ve written before about how it doesn’t matter how much the client pays, it matters how much profit you make after the costs you incur are subtracted from the price you charge.

National branded legal franchises look like an excellent way to accomplish the goal of providing more with less to this market. Let us do the things you hate, the franchisors tell lawyers, like marketing and branding and administration and whatnot. You do the things you love, like practise law and serve clients. Our efficiencies reduce your costs, so you can price competitively yet still keep more of what you charge (with a slice to us, of course). As more and more legal tasks pass through Richard Susskind’s five declining stages of work, from bespoke to commodity, the “low-end” “commoditized” share of the market is going to grow. Firms that took a more enlightened approach to this sector should reap the rewards.

And the big firms, the global giants? They have plenty of marketing and branding firepower, without question, and they’re awfully good at what they do. But they’re also susceptible to the weakness inherent in the traditional law firm model: your assets walk out the door every night, and you need to pray they come back the next morning or else you don’t have a business. The Lawyer reported this month on a survey of nearly 2,000 partner moves in London from 2005-2010 that found almost half of those hires left their new firm within five years, and up to a third left after three. Do you think those acquisitions were good investments of those firms’ time, money and effort?

As legal work drifts towards commoditization, lawyers drift towards fungibility. All five partners in your branded storefront franchise walked out today? You can probably find five other lawyers with very similar skill sets to replace them — and in this economy, you can probably do so fairly quickly. But brand names and logos — they don’t leave. Now suppose that all five partners in your large firm’s biotechnology practice group walk out the door; you have a much bigger problem. A wise manager once said that if he discovers he has an irreplaceable employee, his mission become making that employee replaceable. Large firms that boast about the irreplaceability of their top earners perhaps don’t realize the double-edged nature of that particular sword.

The oldest axiom in the legal business is that clients buy the lawyer, not the firm. This is true and always will be true, insofar as the lawyer brings something unique to the table: extraordinary skills, outstanding personality, or perhaps most importantly, the ability to craft and perfect a trusted relationship. But absent those conditions — and those conditions, I expect, will become increasingly rare — and with bespoke legal work diminishing, clients’ buying criteria are going to expand to emphasize factors like price, accessibility and reliability. When you’re sliding towards those criteria, you’re walking into territory where national brands have developed a very strong home-field advantage.

Are you selling clients your lawyers or your firm? Think carefully about the ramifications of your answer, now and down the road, because clients are starting to ask themselves the same question.

Jordan Furlong speaks 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.

1. Price wars are a death spiral. Every time you reduce your fees for a service to undercut a competitor, you set off a chain reaction whereby everyone in the market goes one step lower until even the “winners” can’t turn a profit. (Although read this James Surowiecki column for a counter-intuitive take on price wars.)

2. Price-cutting leads to quality reduction. It’s simple: if you’re not bringing in as much money for the same work, you need to cut back somewhere else: firing an able assistant, scrimping on new supplies, taking on more files than you can competently handle. (Although read the rest of this post for my thoughts on cutbacks.)

3. Price is an important marketplace signal. Unsophisticated buyers (and in the law, that’s most buyers) want the best deal, but they also worry about services that seem too cheap to be true. Lawyers offer a top-quality product, and a robust price for that product gives buyers confidence in its quality. (Although it’s perilous to count on the continuing ignorance of your customer base.)

So it’s both sensible and logical to tell lawyers not to compete on price. Yet for all that, I’ve come to believe that it’s not good advice anymore. I think we need to learn, as a profession, how to compete on price in ways that sustain our businesses.

It’s fine, in the abstract, for a lawyer to refuse to match or beat a rival’s lower price for a given product or service. The first few times a lawyer loses a client that way, she can content herself that she held the line against the devaluation of her services and that a client who only cares about price will be a difficult client throughout. But what happens when she loses the fifth client, or the tenth, or the fiftieth, because of price? What happens when clients start to consistently say, “I can get these services at a substantially lower price down the street,” or “I like working with you, but I can’t justify the premium that you charge”?

Many lawyers are already in this boat — much of the residential real estate bar, for instance. For these lawyers, refusing to compete on price is not a practical option, because their clients have made clear that price is the most important factor in their purchasing decision. There’s little point in charging what you believe is a fair price if no one’s buying at that price. Worse, more lawyers are going to join that boat over the course of this decade, as technology, collaboration, globalization, and regulatory change combine to rearrange the competitive landscape. We may complain about low-priced “non-lawyer” competitors and denigrate the quality of their work, but if clients buy what they sell at those prices, that’s going to affect what everyone else can charge. And not only will the quality of their offerings improve over time, but it also won’t be only “non-lawyers” doing it. Whether we like it or not, price will become a significant competitive factor, and it will be dangerous to run our businesses pretending otherwise.

So what can we do? The risks of constant price reductions detailed above are all too real, yet the day will soon come where we have to lower our prices just to stay in the marketplace conversation. If you can upgrade the type and quality of your services to premium or luxury levels and therefore maintain or even increase your prices, good for you. But there’s only so much room at the top of the mountain and not everyone can stand there; and in any event, raising the quality of what you offer often requires increasing what you spend to offer it, getting you no farther ahead.

But you don’t need to compete on price if you can go one better: compete on cost. Reduce the inefficiencies in your practice, streamline your processes, systematize where feasible, outsource if possible, reallocate resources to match the appropriate level of talent to the appropriate sophistication of tasks. This isn’t about freezing salaries or eliminating positions or taking away free coffee or all the other myopic expense-reduction steps many law firms took during the financial crisis. This is about restructuring your business in smart ways that reduce waste, cut down on system leakage, fine-tune your engines and upgrade your capacity.

Competing on cost means you spend less to get the same results as your law firm competitors, and puts you on an even footing with the non-firm competitors currently storming the gates. No matter what happens in the marketplace, one rule never changes: profit = revenue – expenses. Even if your revenue is down, you’ll still turn a profit if your expenses are down further: the lawyer who charges $500 for services that cost him $200 is doing better than the lawyer who charges $1,000 for services that cost him $900. You can’t control what the market will pay you; but you can control, to a large extent, what you spend to compete in that market. If you ever expect to seriously offer fixed fees to the marketplace, you absolutely must start by competing on cost.

Here are some examples of how you can compete on cost:

- Install a legal project management system. Probably the simplest way to introduce business efficiencies to your law firm is to adopt the principles of legal project management. From a basic back-of-the-envelope process for doing certain tasks systematically all the way up to a full-scale Lean Six Sigma re-engineering of your entire operation, you’ll wind up with clearer goals, more explicit processes, more efficient systems and increased productivity.

- Automate anything repetitive that moves. Your client intake system, your most frequent inquiries, your most common procedures, your most familiar routines: if the same basic task occurs more than occasionally in your firm, it should be converted into a template, a checklist, a document assembly system, or some other means by which completion is made faster, variation is made more difficult, and fewer resources are expended needlessly.

- Move work up and down the talent chain. Move dictation and transcription from secretaries down to voice-recognition devices. Move legal research to freelance specialists across town or outside the country. Move administrative tasks to virtual assistants. Move e-discovery to people or systems actually qualified to do it. Then train the people who used to do low-value work in high-value skills like project management, business development, human resources and so forth. Same people, same resources, but better allocated and with new capabilities.

- Use technology wherever possible. Practice management software, on your server or preferably in the cloud, delivers huge efficiency gains. Specialized accounting software for law offices reduces errors and improves productivity. Take advantage of low-cost, internet-based contact management systems. Give serious thought to going paperless, or at least paper-less. If you’re already using these tools, constantly train your staff to become more proficient with them. Exploit what Dave Bilinsky calls the “new leverage”: using technology to achieve higher rates of return on each hour of work.

- Give serious thought to outsourcing. There’s one reason big firms like WilmerHale and CMS Cameron McKenna have struck deals with legal process outsourcing firms to move millions of dollars worth of business and back-office functions to smaller centers: efficiency gains that help them compete on cost. To be sure, there are human costs to be dealt with, but if you take a hard look at the numbers, you might find the logic of outsourced operations to be inescapable.

- Come up with a non-hourly billing and compensation system. It probably goes without saying that the single biggest inefficiency in most law firms is the fact that tasks are worth more the longer they take and the more resources they consume. Hourly billing — and more importantly in this context, hourly compensation — is a productivity hemorrhage that’s becoming far more damaging to firms than to clients. And it is not sustainable.

You can probably look around your office right now and find five ways that costs could be reduced or efficiencies could be introduced without a corresponding drop in quality (and maybe even an increase). Most often, the reasons why your firm avoids dealing with these inefficiencies are personal or political or both. But it’s not mission impossible, as the saying goes; only mission difficult. And I would suggest that as of right now, it’s also mission critical. Getting a grip on and eliminating inefficiency in a positive, sensible way is probably the most under-valued tool law firms possess to increase their productivity.

If there’s a downside to this approach, I don’t see it. Suppose that none of these dire warnings come to pass, and that the legal marketplace remains the safe, cozy, bloated anachronism it’s always been. By making cost competition a strategic priority, you’ll have increased your profitability vis-a-vis your rival firms, channeled more money to your partners, become more attractive to potential lateral hires, and given your firm the leverage, if you ever wanted, to make your rivals compete on price on your terms.

But say the marketplace erupts in the ways I’ve been describing, and hyper-efficient competitors emerge that can beat your usual fees by 30, 50, 70 percent or more. Without a streamlined operation in place and no time to install one in the chaos and pressure facing you, you run the serious risk of becoming another victim of market change. But if you’ve already prepared to beat these new entrants at their own game, you’ll at least have a fighting chance. Competing on price might be a necessary evil, but competing on cost can be the key to your success.

I used this analogy — high-wattage lamps that cast vast amounts of light in a wide circle, contrasted with smaller, sharper, focused sources that put only the light you need exactly where you need it — in a recent discussion about the future size of law firms. My theory is that most things being equal, the future belongs to smaller firms and solos, because the large-firm model ultimately suffers from an over-reliance on volume and an inability to finely focus resources.

Many big firms are like very large lamps with incredibly high-wattage bulbs that radiate huge amounts of heat and light — but in doing so, waste a lot of energy because they light up parts of the room that don’t need it and that aren’t going to produce a return on illumination investment, so to speak. Smaller firms, which do only a few things and do them in a very specific way, are like flexible halogen lights that aren’t for everyone and everything — but are ideal for certain contexts and needs. Mass broadcast power through reach and volume was the key to success in the 20th century, from media to manufacturing to marketing, and large law firms flourished in this environment. Their largeness was a competitive feature: volume as strategy, size as an end in itself.

In the 21st century, a different model will take hold. The future is fragmented, channeled, specific, focused, niched: a needle instead of a sledgehammer, a laser instead of a lamp. The elements of small practice — flexibility, dexterity, specialization, and personalized service — are ideally suited to the deeply diverse, long-tail legal marketplace that’s now emerging. A recent Economist article about the forthcoming U.S. census makes clear just how much is changing. The 2010 census is expected to reveal an unprecedented degree of diversity in the American population, a development of the utmost importance to marketers:

Cesar Conde, president of Univision Networks, a Spanish-language media company, says [the census] will be a “wake-up to marketers”. Once the results are in, firms are likely to invest more in marketing to minorities, to develop more products to appeal specifically to them, to advertise in languages other than English and to hire more racially diverse models. Peter Francese, a demographer at Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising agency, thinks the 2010 census will permanently change marketing. When companies analyse the census data, they will see that cities, and even some neighbourhoods, are so diverse now that broad advertising campaigns are no longer suitable. Mass-market advertising, he says, will become “extinct”. Marketers will instead have to focus on reaching specific households.

While the mass market continues to shrink and dry up, technology is simultaneously making the tiniest niche more accessible. Consider what Google CEO Eric Schmidt said about the future of his company: the goal is to give the user exactly one right answer to a query, not a list of possible right answers, essentially transforming Google from a search engine to a “find engine.” This technology already exists in the form of Wolfram Alpha, an “answer engine” that “computes and provides answers and relevant visualizations from a core knowledge base of curated, structured data.” These innovations should be widely available not much more than ten years from now, and at that point, how much good is size and volume going to do you, in terms of attracting customers and answering needs? People looking for legal help will find the one right answer or the one best answer, and all the size and marketing wattage in the world won’t help you be a better solution.

Starting now, law firms will have to justify their size. This is not only because the economic rationale for some law firm lawyers will cease to exist — traditional associates with too little work to pay their salaries, partners who fail to demonstrate their contribution in value terms, and the general decline of the leveraged pyramid model — but also because the advantages of size qua size are disappearing. Largeness does still have its virtues, starting with the fact that many big institutional clients need a law firm with multiple offices and a hefty workforce to mobilize on short notice. Big firms also offer “lawyer insurance” to clients: if my lawyer is away, five others can take my urgent call. And brand still counts for a lot, and will presumably count for even more in the age of the “answer engine,” when there’ll be a real advantage to circumventing the search process altogether.

But many of these virtues are gradually being counteracted by technological and cultural developments. Solos can collaborate with each other, through social networks and websites, as easily as a big-firm lawyer can walk down the hall and talk to a colleague — and can serve as backups for each other too. Small-firm lawyers can afford all the technological bells and whistles that big firms have long enjoyed, especially with the rise of SaaS and open-source technology. Small-firm lawyers can write blogs for next to nothing that, with the help of advanced SEO and link-building techniques, could outdo million-dollar big-firm marketing budgets in terms of getting the attention of the clients they want. With all these forces at play, a law firm that’s larger than it needs to be is going to run into problems.

Any biologist will tell you that the bigger an organism, the more energy and resources it needs to expend to keep going. Unless there’s a powerful competitive advantage to being big, smallness will begin to assert itself. Today, there are tiny desktop lamps that cast stronger light than the biggest, most florid 1970s table lamp, and even tinier lasers that put them both to shame in terms of power and accuracy. If you’re looking for a reliable model for law firms of the future, I’d recommend betting on the laser.

BigLaw partners operate under the amusing notion that a flat governance model in which every partner is an equal owner with equal authority is somehow a rational business choice, when in fact it’s an inefficient, extraordinarily dilutive and disruptive structure that persists due to inertia.  To be clear, the partners can organize their sandbox however they want, but this scenario rewards senior marketers who have learned to please partners above advancing the financial interests of the firm.  Indeed, there are countless examples of experienced marketers from other disciplines stymied by the bizarre world of BigLaw.

As one CMO put it to me without irony, “Success in a large law firm is all about credibility, which means accepting that we don’t often do things the right way, we do them our partners’ way, but after about a year of serving their needs you should have built up enough credibility to gently make suggestions, most of which they’ll discard, but to survive you can’t try to do too much too quickly.”

Politics and personality do take on outsized importance in a large enterprise, such that the merits of any given initiative often take a back seat to figuring out which important people’s interests require catering or flattering. By effectively giving every partner veto power over business decisions, law firms make that situation a lot worse. Appeasement replaces innovation, expectations are lowered repeatedly, and pretty soon nobody has the heart to try anything new. It’s no way to run a business of any substantial size, and if non-lawyer ownership of law firms ever catches on worldwide, that might well be the beginning of the end for this model.

For the foreseeable future, though, the flat partnership structure is a fact of life.  But I tend to think the organizational model per se isn’t the problem so much as the fact that many lawyers seem incapable of letting other professionals do their jobs without interference or second-guessing.

Lawyers seem to come factory-shipped with the notion that they know better than you how to do things you’ve been trained to do. People who work with or for lawyers — secretaries, paralegals, marketers, recruiters, PD experts, consultants, and so on — can all relate eye-rolling stories of lawyers who really believe that their fleeting sentiments on a given subject merit equal consideration to what the trained professional in question has advised. It seems that only IT people escape this kind of treatment, probably because many lawyers are intimidated by anything more technological than a BlackBerry.

But marketing seems to get the worst of it. I’ve heard one business consultant, who has worked with professionals in numerous fields, say that nobody treats their own marketing people with as little respect as lawyers do. Many qualified law firm marketers are reduced to menial publicity tasks after yet another initiative of real substance has been stalled or buried. I’ve seen worthwhile legal marketing and branding campaigns snuffed out because one or two lawyers in the room didn’t like a particular tag line, image, or even colour scheme in an advertisement — even when it’s made clear that the campaigns are not directed to lawyers at all, but to clients.

Why are lawyers so prone to this kind of behaviour? Some of it certainly can be traced to the particular strain of arrogance that legal training seems to inculcate. Being a lawyer can operate as a kind of expertise multiplier, making a small knowledge base suddenly seem much larger. My English degree may be gathering dust in a closet somewhere, but I can at least remember Pope’s Essay on Criticism: “A little learning is a dangerous thing /Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring / There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain.”

But I think a lot of it comes down to trust — many lawyers are just plain reluctant to trust the opinions and instincts of people from outside the profession. One of the reasons lawyers invite a colleague into partnerships is that they trust the lawyer’s skills and acumen — a partner by definition is someone you trust without even thinking about it. I wonder if one of the reasons most ethics rules prohibit “non-lawyer” (a hateful phrase) admission to partnership is that lawyers can’t quite bring themselves to grant that same level of trust to those outside the bar. Yes, you’re qualified and diligent, experienced and savvy — but you’re not a lawyer, and that still matters for some reason. Few lawyers trust the merits of something they can’t authenticate through direct experience; most lawyers have never marketed; and marketing looks easy from the outside.

This is more than just an annoying quirk — this is a major obstacle to the efficient operation of legal enterprises of all sizes. If you’re constantly overruling or second-guessing or stymieing the best efforts of your qualified professional associates — if you just can’t accept that someone without a law degree knows more about a business management issue than you do — then you’re wasting time, missing opportunities and burning money. Law firms everywhere are doing all three, at a time when the importance of these professionals to the firm’s survival has never been greater.

Successful law firms have figured out that there are some things lawyers do very well and some things that other professionals do very well, and they delegate authority accordingly. Good lawyers do more than just hire a marketing or recruitment or strategic professional — they trust them enough to follow their advice and give them enough room to operate. Good lawyers have the  wisdom to accept that they don’t know everything and the confidence to yield control to those better qualified. Of course they consult with these professionals and raise concerns when they have them. But at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for trust and no disguising its absence.  If you don’t trust your professionals to do the jobs you hired them to do, everyone in the firm figures it out pretty quickly and behaves accordingly.

So the fundamental problem might not be that lawyers can torpedo or hijack a given initiative. The problem is that they do, often reflexively, without sufficient grounds. Few lawyers have the discipine and confidence to keep from wading into unfamiliar waters until they’re over their head. Law firm leaders need to keep improving trust between a firm’s lawyers and its other professionals, until the latter can maximize the firm’s value and effectiveness without having to constantly look over their shoulder at the former.

• your Twitter account doesn’t show your name or link to a web page
• you’ve been on Twitter for more than half an hour and you don’t have a photo
• you’ve posted hardly any updates before following me
• you’ve protected your updates, giving me no reason to follow you
• your ratio of following-to-followed is more than 5 to 1
• your updates are mostly links to your blog posts or press releases
• more than half your updates are RTs of people I already follow
• not one of your last 20 updates contains a link I feel like clicking on
• you’re selling something (a product, service, cause or belief)
• your posts are political and bitter, or political and smug
• you’re Oprah Winfrey

Many of these are characteristics of Twitterers who aren’t all that interested in their followers or inclined to find out what those followers might find worthwhile. They don’t want a conversation, they just want an audience  — a “follower”  in the narrowest sense of the word. They also seem to constitute the majority of Twitter users, and unfortunately, they include more than a few lawyers, legal professionals and legal industry suppliers. This doesn’t mean lawyers shouldn’t use Twitter, but it does mean they need to use it well, which means they need to understand what to use it for.

I’m coming to think it’s a mistake to describe Twitter to lawyers as a marketing tool, for a couple of reasons. First, most lawyers don’t really know what marketing is or how to do it properly, so they end up doing it as badly on Twitter as they do on their websites or in their advertisements. They think marketing is about telling everyone how amazing they are, which is why they talk far more about themselves than they do about clients. And clients, reasonably enough, find that dull and kind of insulting, so they tune it out.

But secondly, and more importantly, Twitter isn’t and was never meant to be a marketing mechanism. Twitter is a communications mechanism — it’s a publishing tool, and the way to use it successfully is to approach it like a publisher. That means learning who your readers are, finding out what they care about, and finding a way to supply it to them or point them in its direction. It’s not about you and what you have, it’s about them and what they need.

For what it’s worth, here’s how I use Twitter. First, I hardly ever talk about myself: what I’m doing, where I’m going, how I’m feeling, what I’m eating, etc. I assume you don’t care, so I don’t bring it up. Secondly, although I do link to my blog posts (and I get a lot of traffic from Twitter), I try to make those posts the exception — the rare commercials in between the programming. What I spend most of my Twitter time doing is trying to find good programming — worthwhile content. It comes in four main varieties:

1. A link to an article I think people will find interesting but that doesn’t merit a full blog post — a microblog (Dennis Kennedy pioneered this in the legal Twittersphere). I keep an eye on a number of legal, media and general news services, looking for something that will interest people who are following me; where possible, I add a short editorial comment of some value.

2. A response to a question or a point someone has raised in reply to an update. Again, I try to make sure the reply has some original content or additional observation that furthers the discussion (obviously a challenge in 140 characters). I also try to keep these exchanges brief, on the theory that people aren’t interested in hearing an extended conversation (or worse, half of one, if they don’t follow the other person).

3. A retweet (or RT) of something other users have said or linked to — I try not to overdo this, especially for Twitterers whom I know have a large following that overlaps with mine (I know I get tired of reading the same post RT’ed by three or four people who all read the same Twitter account that I do).

4. Less formal stuff: expressing thanks to people who’ve RTed my blog post (I always try to track those, and my gratitude is always genuine) or linking to something I found odd or amusing.  (I’ll confess a weakness for breaking news, which is a bad habit — racing to be the first to relay a big event, happy or sad, carries the tang of sensationalism or exploitation.)

In the result, my Twitter feed is a personalized news service, but not about me — about what I find interesting. It gives you information and perspectives that I consider useful, insightful or entertaining, relayed to you in the hope that you’ll share my sentiments about them and find value in them as I did.

The price of that feed — the advertising, if you like — is the occasional update about a new blog post. I know that those advertisements work, because my Twitter feed has driven more regular traffic here. But although that’s a clear benefit from Twittering, it’s not the reason why I Twitter — I do it because I like informing people about things that, based on their interest in my feed, I know we share a common interest in. You can call that marketing if you like, but it’s the very definition of publishing.

Of course, most lawyers aren’t publishers, and their interest in Twitter extends only so far as there are tangible benefits to their business (and rightly so). But I think the same principles that guide my Twitter use can apply to lawyers’ hard-nosed business use of Twitter.

Above all, you need to remember that no one reads Twitter because they care about you — they do it because they care about themselves. So talk to them, and talk about them. Give them links to news and knowledge that benefit them, no matter where these links lead (even, I’d go so far as to say, to a competitor’s website). Offer tips, pithy observations, and checklists in serial form (no one uses Twitter this way better than Matt Homann). Ask questions relevant to your practice area, and blog the results (and link to the post from Twitter, of course). Strive to make your Twitter feed an important source of knowledge to your readers.

But, you say, how do you know what your Twitter followers care about? Well, you could do what I did: accidentally and organically assemble a group of people who must be interested in what I have to say on Twitter. Or you could take a serious client-development approach to it. Here are some steps you should consider if you really intend to use Twitter as a business tool.

• Conduct a Twitter audit — if you don’t know who your readers are, you’re not going to derive much business value from it. Make a list of your followers, divide them into current or potential clients and the merely curious, and cultivate relationships via email or direct messages with the former group.

• Use the @yourname function to figure out who’s RTing you, and send these people very nice personal notes — they’re  doing your Twitter marketing for you, and for free.

• Solicit feedback on your Twitter updates — create an email address, twitter@yourfirm.com, to which people can send criticisms, questions and ideas. Then act on them.

• On a regular basis, assemble your best Twitter updates into a blog post — as Steve Matthews says, Twitter is a river, and most people step in and out of it only occasionally, so make sure your pearls of wisdom are collected for future reference — theirs and yours. (Steve’s list of Twitter do’s and don’ts, just posted at Slaw, far outstrips anything I have to say here).

Finally, don’t concern yourself with how many followers you have — it’s a meaningless statistic, not least because a lot of people are gaming the system to try to build up impressive-looking follower totals, to make themselves look more popular than they deserve or just to stroke their egos. Concentrate on quality over quantity — ten loyal readers, any of whom could bring you business any day, are worth more than a  thousand followers who added you out of curiosity, reflex or politeness.

The only point of using a communications and publishing tool like Twitter is to know who your readers are, know what they care about, and provide it to them. If you do that right, you’ll establish yourself as a trusted source of knowledge in an area of importance — which, last I checked, is what marketing is about anyway.

My contribution thus far has been to ask (a) whether  that protection actually materializes in practice, (b) how much outside counsel work is so important that it requires the F&E imprimatur, and (c) if any GC has yet been fired for failing to rein in outside counsel costs. The whole conversation might eventually form the basis of a separate post. But it does lead me to a related and I think pretty important subject: what “law firm prestige” itself actually represents.

“Prestige” is one of those words, like “professionalism” and “value,” that we throw around a lot in the law without establishing exactly what we mean by it. Interestingly, trace its etymology back to Middle French and you’ll find it originally referred to an illusion or a conjuror’s trick, a sleight-of-hand; if you’ve ever wondered where the old magician’s standby “Presto!” comes from, you have your answer. That’s something to keep in mind when considering law firms’ “prestige” — that we’re talking more about the appearance or suggestion of merit than we are about the actual presence of merit itself.

Let’s say an in-house counsel purchases a law firm’s services at least in part because he expects that firm’s “prestige” will provide effective cover against adverse outcomes. The clear implication, I would think, is that that prestige reflects a higher quality of service and/or results, as compared with less well-known or less “prestigious” firms — otherwise, why would it be relevant to the question of whether the corporate counsel made the right call? This implies that there’s a rational, measurable connection between a prestigious, well-known name and better, more reliable results.

But is that actually the case? And it it’s not, are clients who rely on “prestige” when making their legal purchasing decisions doing little more than buying smoke and mirrors?

Let’s break this down: what are the elements of “prestige”? Does it involve longevity? Maybe — but Thacher Proffitt & Wood just disappeared in its 160th year. Is it about having a stable of famous clients? Maybe — but Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Northern Rock, Circuit City, Nortel, the Tribune Company and many others, not to mention GM and Chrysler, all retained prestigious firms. Is it about having the “best” lawyers? Maybe — but considering that partner movement is now so frequent among large firms that the AmLaw Daily has a regular section called “The Churn,” I’m not sure how  the fleeting presence of individual lawyers can affect prestige.

It seems to me that, like the old SCOTUS definition of obscenity, many people believe they know prestige when they see it. I’m dubious. As far as I can tell, among the constituent elements of law firm “prestige” today, along with longevity, name clients and name lawyers, are tony corporate addresses, marble-lined reception areas, old masters on the wall and in the corner office, a collection of long-past accomplishments, massive marketing expenditures, and often, just sheer size (a factor ably assisted by a legal media disproportionately interested in the largest of large law firms). Roll all these together and Presto! You have a prestigious law firm.

When a general counsel tells the board of directors that he protected the company’s interests by hiring a prestigious law firm, those directors assume that a law firm’s prestige is rationally and demonstrably connected to a higher quality of service and results. I don’t know that that’s a safe assumption. I don’t know if there’s a direct correlation between a firm’s prestige and its excellence or reliability. And since that assumed connection is actually the fundamental premise upon which is based many general counsels’ hiring rationales, I’d say this is something worth exploring in some more detail.

Because if that premise is flawed — if prestige, however we define it, isn’t rationally connected to quality of service, results or satisfaction — then that’s a pretty major obstacle to the efficient operation of the legal services marketplace.

Published yesterday, the article posited a relative absence of women blawggers (rather ironically, considering the term “blawg” was coined by Denise Howell) and suggested various hypotheses to explain the shortage. Within 24 hours, the article had touched off responses across the blawgosphere, from Nicole Black, Ann Althouse, Mary Dudziak, Christine Hurt, Diane Levin, and Laurie Mapp, along with Scott Greenfield and Robert Ambrogi.

The upshot of most of these posts is that the writer failed to look deeply enough into the legal blogosphere, restricting her research to the most highly trafficked sites and those of large law firms. While that’s true, I also think there’s something to be said for male law bloggers’ tendency to link to other men disproportionately more than to women. I think it’s also worth noting that if there is a serious paucity of women bloggers, it’s mostly inside of law firms, especially the larger ones. I may be verging on cynicism here, but I think that’s largely because two things law firms don’t tend to take very seriously are the careers of their women lawyers and the utility of blogs.

Several bloggers also pointed out that until this article asked the question, it had never occurred to them to think about the gender of the other bloggers they read or linked to — it was of the sheerest irrelevance. My own blogroll includes bloggers like Carolyn Elefant, Susan Cartier Liebel, Connie Crosby, Merrilyn Astin Tarlton, and Penelope Trunk, but until I made that list, I had never thought about the male-female breakdown. Ditto for the people I follow on Twitter, including most of the above as well as Victoria Pynchon, Mina Sirkin, Donna Seale, Kelly Phillips Erb, and too many others to list. But just because I haven’t thought about blawggers’ gender before isn’t an excuse to not think about it now, and I’m glad for the opportunity to learn about more women law bloggers worth reading.

But what really struck me among all the posts on this topic, and what I’m really interested in writing about today, came from Ann Althouse. Responding to the suggestion in the original article that women avoid blogging because they’re more prone to professional or personal attack, she wrote: “The internet is not going to coddle and comfort you. In fact, the internet wants you out of here.” [Emphasis in original] While the delivery is a little harsh, I think this is a powerful and profound statement, and every lawyer who intends to build her or her profile and brand online needs to be aware of it and accept it.

The blogosphere is intensely, almost fanatically competitive. There are millions upon millions of blogs out there, and each of them needs readers’ attention to survive the way you and I need air. There’s only so much of that attention to go around, producing what Davenport and Beck called the attention economy — the decision to view or listen to something has become a significant economic choice. You could also analogize the blogosphere to the Cambrian explosion, an unprecedented and unexplained flourishing of life on Earth on a massive scale about 500 million years ago. Either way, there are only so many resources to go around, and if you really want to make a go of it in this environment, you’re in for a tremendous fight.

Some of the sadder (to me) comments in all the posts about women law bloggers came from lawyers who started blogs and gamely maintained them for as long as they could, but eventually gave up after generating very little traffic and attention. I’m a writer at heart, and that heart goes out to anyone with a manuscript unfinished or a blog abandoned because they grew discouraged by the lack of audience interest. But while some of these projects could have been saved with better marketing or friendlier circumstance, many failed on the merits — either their subject or their style, or both, just wasn’t compelling enough to earn attention credits from an increasingly busy, demanding and fickle readership.

I’m not suggesting it should be any other way, mind you — if all the 900,000 blog posts in the last 24 hours actually got read, the global economy (such as it is these days) would lurch to a sudden halt. And every environment throws up obstacles to ensure that only the truly talented and committed reach anything like a rarefied atmosphere: Seth Godin’s The Dip talks about how medical schools create the buzzsaw barrier of Organic Chemistry in undergrad to weed as many people as possible out of the pre-med stream. These are realities of every competitive environment, and they apply to the blawgosphere too.

Law blogging proponents can be a little cavalier in their standard recommendation that you “start a blog” — I’ve certainly been guilty of that sometimes. But lawyers who want to use blogs to build their brands and promote their profiles need to understand just how challenging a path they’re choosing. Even assuming you’re a really good writer and you know your subject area really well, you need to be realistic about these cold facts:

* Other lawyers are blogging about this too. Unless you’ve chosen an extreme niche, your chosen field is very likely already occupied or soon will be. Check out all the blogs tracked at the ABA Blawg Directory or LexMonitor for a sober assessment of your playing field.

* The noise level on the Internet is staggering. Everyone on the Net is yammering at everyone else to pay attention to them, and users are always on the edge of being overwhelmed. Legitimate SEO strategies are indisputably important, but appreciate that your ideal readership is always a little deafened.

* Your readers read more than just blogs. This is the single biggest mistake in every publishing medium: magazines assume that their readers only read other magazines, newspapers think they only compete with newspapers, bloggers compare themselves only to other bloggers. Everything that is printed, broadcast, sung, illustrated or otherwise meant for a sensory target is part of the attention economy. You’re up against YouTube and Extreme Home Makeover whether you like it or not.

* The Internet demands commitment. Millions of blogs are abandoned every day, and the Net brushes them aside like litter. What the Net wants from you is a sign that you’re willing to stick it out through the bad times (and there’ll be bad times, believe me). Blog readers don’t just check out the post Google has led them to — they check out how long you’ve been posting and how frequently you post. If you’re in for the long and steady haul, readers are likelier to trust you and return to you.

Look, I’m a strong believer in the Chuck Jones school of creative motivation. Jones was once asked whether his Warner Brothers cartoons were meant for children or adults. “I don’t draw them for children and I don’t draw them for adults,” he replied. “I draw them for me.” At the end of the day, the number of people in your Delighted Audience has to be at least one: you. And nobody has ever said a blog is only as worthwhile as the number of readers it has: Rees Morrison, for one, has said he blogs as much for his own records and to facilitate his own thinking, and doesn’t blog to attract clients or generate work.

But if you want to blog as a way to promote yourself — and I really think every lawyer should at least seriously consider doing so — also seriously consider that it’s not as easy as falling off a log. You’ll find yourself, as we all tend to do, checking your daily visits log and counting the number of RSS subscribers, and wondering how to raise them. You’ll find yourself (or a partner, colleague or spouse) inevitably asking about the ROI on this project. You’ll wonder why, even with good content and steady visitors, you (or even your whole gender) can seem invisible to people writing about the legal blogosphere.

If you’re not prepared for this beforehand, then blogging can be a deeply dispiriting experience. But if you are prepared, and you’re both realistic about the challenge and committed to the goal, then the rewards can be extraordinary. The Internet doesn’t want you here –but you can want to be here more.

And as always, I’ll post it here, too.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the ascendance of individual lawyer brands. Today, I want to write about the corresponding decline of law firm brands. And there’s no better place to start that discussion than with the fate of Heller Ehrman.

Heller Ehrman, if you’re not familiar with it, is a century-old California law firm that dissolved last week. You can find detailed coverage here, here and here. The lasting impression you take away from these reports is that Heller was neither evil nor incompetent. Its rivals were sad to see it fall, and many of its employees were devastated and in tears, referring to the firm as a “family.” There’s no schadenfreude or sense of just desserts here.

Heller is not the first firm to go down in the relative blink of an eye. Here in Canada, the profession was shocked last year by the sudden collapse of respected Toronto firm Goodman and Carr. Other names like Brobeck and Coudert come to mind as well. In most of these cases, what really stands out is the astonishing speed and seeming lack of warning with which everything gave way. The only tremor emanating from Heller was a pair of failed merger talks, but as soon as that word began circulating, the breakdown was underway.

Sound familiar? It should, unless you’ve ignored newspapers and television for the last two weeks, and the collapsing house of cards on Wall Street that they’ve been chronicling. Because when you get right down to it, the same affliction really took out both Heller Ehrman and the likes of Lehman Brothers: the marketplace suddenly stopped believing in them.

The consistent theme of the analyses emerging from Wall Street’s rubble is that the industry’s level of trust in each of these entities fell away, first gradually and then suddenly. And when that happened, what became apparent — with frightening speed and clarity — was that trust was really the only thing keeping these institutions afloat. Here’s Derek DeCloet of the Globe & Mail:

Mistrust – or lack of confidence, if you prefer – is the most corrosive thing you can ever have coursing through the world’s banks and credit markets. Mistrust maims and destroys. In the end, a financial institution’s only asset is trust. Brand names, history, branches on the prime corner of small towns – they don’t mean a thing unless there’s confidence. Ask anyone who worked for Northern Rock, IndyMac, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers ….

And here’s James Surowiecki in the New Yorker:

[T]he entire edifice of Wall Street is built on confidence. Investment banks rely on short-term debt to run their businesses, and their businesses consist of activities — trading, deal-making, money management — that depend on people’s faith in their ability to honor their obligations. As soon as the customers and creditors of a company like Lehman start to wonder whether it might collapse, they become less willing to lend or to trade, and more likely to demand their money back. The perception of weakness exacerbates the reality of weakness. And although there are myriad measures of a company’s health, nothing looks scarier than a stock price that’s heading toward zero. …

The downward spiral can be stunningly fast and near-impossible to escape. Lehman’s assets were not significantly more toxic last Monday, when the company filed for bankruptcy protection, than they had been a week earlier. And, technically speaking, the bank may not even have run out of money, since it had access to an emergency liquidity line from the Federal Reserve. What Lehman did run out of was credibility. It couldn’t remain a going concern because creditors and customers no longer trusted it.

Try reading those entries again, substituting law firms for investment banks. What Heller Ehrman demonstrates, and what should seriously worry managing partners everywhere right now, is that law firms really are no different. Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith Esq. is exactly right:

[T]he stark, glaring reality is that law firms are fragile institutions. … There doesn’t need to be anything wrong with Heller, or Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, or Merrill Lynch, for people and the market at large to perceive there’s something wrong with any of those firms. It’s the run on the bank mentality. … The curtains come down and the lights go out when the abrupt exodus of partners, clients, and erosion of the revenue base, occasion breaches of bank lending covenants and a shut-off of credit.

A law firm’s most important asset is not its work in progress, and it’s not even the people who walk out the door every night. It’s the confidence that the market places in the firm — the extent to which the firm inspires the continuing untroubled assumption that this collection of talent and commitment is safe to believe in. Everything else is details. And that’s why law firm brand is so critical.

Very few law firms possess what marketers would strictly refer to as a “brand” — a differentiating reputation for or identification with some distinguishable trait that constitutes a competitive advantage. But every law firm of even minimal presence has a “brand” in the sense of a recognizable profile in the marketplace based on acceptable levels of competence and reliability.

If a firm is known to sufficient numbers of clients, carries out its tasks, and keeps its promises, it earns confidence. Its name — be it Skadden, Linklater, or McCarthy, or something less gilt-edged — is shorthand for a repository of client trust. Its brand is essentially its marketplace ID, its industry access pass, its credit line of credibility. Lose that, and it loses everything.

And here we come to the crux of the issue for law firms: a brand needs to be controlled. If you’re not in charge of your own brand, if you can’t make it be and do what you want, you’ve got a problem. Because that means someone or something else is in charge of your brand, and you’re at their mercy. Law firms are running out of ways and means by which to control their brands.

Look at it this way: a brand is a promise to the marketplace that your product or service will consistently feature the characteristics X, Y and Z. An individual lawyer can say, “I will provide these sorts of legal services, I will deliver them in this fashion, and I will deliver them to these types of clients.” That’s the heart and soul of a professional brand right there. The lawyer who chooses to makes those promises and carries through on them controls his brand.

A pair of lawyers can make and keep those promises about as well as one can. Five can manage it, though it gets harder to ensure everyone meets and maintains the same standards and criteria. It’s harder again with a dozen lawyers. And when you get past 20 — and especially when you get to 200, or 2,000 — it becomes well nigh impossible. Law firms of any substantial size really have little control over the clients they take on, the ways in which they deliver legal services to those clients, and who is delivering those services. Think about it.

Law firms don’t have much control over the clients individual lawyers take on. Conflicts of interest are the only obstacle that a firm can realistically place in the way of a partner who wants to being in a new client. Unless the new client would interfere unduly with an existing (and more profitable) client, a lawyer is generally free to take it on — regardless of how poorly or even contemptuously his or her partners might regard that client. The lifeblood of a law firm is billable business, and as long as the lawyer brings that business in, the firm won’t much mind who or what the business is attached to.

Law firms don’t control how lawyers deal with their clients. Lawyers are notorious for the unique and even idiosyncratic ways in which they deal with their clients. They call clients as often or as infrequently as they like, deliver written opinions in whatever format they prefer, offer as much or as little detail and explanation as suits them and their individual clients, and so forth. Consultants urge firms to institute differentiating practices like 24-hour client callback. But the reality is that enforcing practices like that is pragmatically difficult and culturally all but impossible. A client who switches lawyers within the same firm might reasonably think he has actually switched firms altogether, for all the consistency in service delivery between the two.

Law firms are losing control over who delivers their services. This is, in many ways, the most critical one, because clients hire the lawyer first, the firm second. Unprecedented lateral movement of partners, combined with firms’ proven inability to retain associates at will, means the people delivering a firm’s services change with mind-spinning frequency. Many clients associate a firm’s brand with that of the lawyers with whom they deal. But if the names and faces of those lawyers keep changing, that reputation becomes equally transient and unreliable. Are you a great M&A firm? Okay, your best two M&A lawyers have just joined your biggest competitor, and a third has gone in-house. What are you now? Your brand has changed, and you had no say in the matter. If that lack of control doesn’t scare you, it should.

What it comes down to is this: a firm’s marketplace currency — its lifeblood — is the degree with which its brand is regarded with confidence by the marketplace (and that includes its clients, its competitors, and its own talent). Managing that brand and maintaining that confidence is therefore of the utmost important. But the means by which a firm’s leadership can do that are slipping away.

The newest, most affordable and most intriguing branding tactics — blogging, Twittering, micro-marketing, pinpointing — trend towards the individual lawyer, not the collective firm. Firm branding tactics — advertising, sponsoring, partnering — are traditional, resource-intensive and mass-market-oriented: blunt instruments in an age of precision targeting. It’s easy for an individual lawyer to build a trusted brand through her character and accomplishments, and to amplify that brand by blogging or podcasting; it’s very difficult for a firm of 100 lawyers to build trust the same way.

If many law firms were to stop and take stock of their most important asset, they would likely realize that their brand owes far more to historical momentum than it does to consistent deliverables. Now, momentum is a powerful force, nowhere more so than in the law; but you simply don’t know when it’s going to run out and Coyote Gravity will kick in. Dig beneath the surface of many law firm brands, and you’ll strike hollow space a lot sooner than you might think. In a lot of cases, there’s not much there there.

What can law firms do about this? Honestly, I’m not really sure there’s much they can do. If your brand is your lifeblood and you don’t have control over it, then you need to take steps to gain that control, even if only a measure of it. You need much stronger oversight of client intake and service delivery methods. You need to outdo all your rivals in terms of your ability to keep partners on board and retain the associates you most want to retain. You need sufficient consensus to enforce at least a modicum of the standards you say you stand for. And frankly, you need to be of a sufficiently compact size that you can realistically manage to accomplish some of these goals.

But really, I’m not sure all of these put together would make enough of a difference. I still believe the long-term future of the legal profession belongs to client-driven alignments of solo and small practices. The world’s largest firms — the 10,000-lawyer behemoths on the distant horizon — are going to be those that specialize in commodity-type work, the kind of things that can be automated, templated, algorithmed and standardized — the kind of work for which ISO 2001 ratings will be meaningful measures of quality assurance. The bigger you are, the more your work needs to be susceptible to the consistency and predictability of the assembly line. That’s just about the only way you can develop and control a brand on a scale of that size, and the law will prove no exception.

If you don’t control the content of your brand, then your brand becomes little more than leftover reputation, general opinion, holdover name recognition. Active brands are powered by trust and confidence, and at the end of the day, these attributes are earned by individuals, not collectives. Gather and nurture these individuals and their brands, and you have a chance. Fail to do so, and you’ll be left sitting around wondering when the inertia will run out.

There will come a day, sooner than many people think, when vast numbers of law firms disappear almost overnight. The shock to the profession will be profound and lasting. But the reason will be simple: the glue that held these entities together — the confidence of the marketplace, the trust in the name, the power of the brand — dried up and wore off, little by little, until the bonds of collectivity simply fell away. That’s what happened to Heller Ehrman.

Who is your firm? Why should we believe you? Why should we believe in you?

But the most essential thing law firms do for their lawyers is to share their brand — to give their lawyers the boost in personal prestige and profile that comes with being associated with a respected name and identity. Set aside all the recruitment and retention pitches — the overriding reason why lawyers stay with a firm for the medium-term or beyond is that the firm’s brand evokes confidence, lends legitimacy, and enhances the lawyer’s personal brand. (For an example of what happens when a firm’s brand collapses, watch the unhappy tale unfolding at Heller Ehrman).

That, at least, has been the traditional way things have gone. More recently, though, in the age of the lateral hire, we’ve seen firms acquire lawyers in the hopes that the lawyer’s personal brand and reputation will reinforce or even enhance the firm’s brand. We’ve also seen the rise of lawyer free agency — rapid lateral movement among firms by lawyers at all career stages, such that it gets harder for firms to base their brands on individual lawyers or practice groups. Most importantly, the combination of associate fungibility, hard economic times and partners’ determination to protect PEP at all costs has resulted in recurring waves of lawyer layoffs, making an indelible impression on lawyers that loyalty to employees is not a law firm characteristic.

These and other phenomena mark the rising importance and influence over the last decade of the lawyer’s personal brand, something that was once foreign to all but a very few outstanding practitioners. Individual lawyers have less need to be associated with a law firm’s brand, at least beyond the first couple of years of practice, because they have become more adept at fashioning their own reputations and taking charge of their own careers.

Now, add two more recent phenomena to that mix: the arrival of millennial lawyers, who don’t stay in any one place very long and place high importance of personal definition and fulfillment; and the growth of the Web a personal brand platform through the use of blogs, podcasts, LinkedIn, Twitter and other forms of self-promotion and brand definition. The result, I think, is a fundamental power shift away from the collective firm brand and towards the individual lawyer brand.

Firms are going to have to cope with this, and in a longer essay later this month, I’ll go into some detail on that point. But for you, the individual lawyer, this means that starting now, you have both the responsibility and the requirement to take full control of your career and your personal brand. You need to assume that no other entity will make a long-term investment in your own success, and that you have to forge an identity and skill set independent of any firm or other legal employer.

If you need a model for that task, look at sole practitioners: this is the life they lead. From day one of their practice, they couldn’t content themselves with simply knowing the law and waiting for the cases to come up the elevator shaft. They had to learn everything about attracting clients, which meant marketing themselves, defining their niches, building their reputation, writing and speaking where clients could see them, and making client service the #1 priority. It also meant understanding the finances of a legal business: overhead costs, lease payments, cost identification, profitability calculations, accounts receivable, bill collection, tax and pension liabilities, and much more.

As all but a few law firm brands decline in importance, and as clients increasingly buy legal services based on the lawyer, not the firm, you’re going to have to add “full-time brand management” to your list of duties and skills. You have to be prominent and persuasive when showing up on Google searches, fully capable of running a small business, and able to keep one strategic eye on the short- and long-term evolution of your markets. Because you won’t be able to rely on law firms to do that kind of thing or share some of their brand power with you.

From now on, we all need to take charge of our brands and our careers. From now on, we are all solos.

There are, perhaps needless to say, a lot of issues here. There’s the company’s name, designed to attract attention from the kind of people (familiar to many lawyers) carrying around a grievance in search of someone to compensate them for it. There’s the question of whether the assessment of the user’s situation, to decide if he has a case worth bringing, will be inclined to have an unusually low “Yes” threshold in order to encourage business. And there’s the fact that the site links the client with a lawyer not based on whether that lawyer really can best serve the client, but on whether she outbid her competitors in an auction for the #1 referral spot.

WhoCanISue.com tells us very little about how online legal marketing will develop. As I’ve said before, the success of future web-based initiatives is going to depend on the degree to which they encourage community and collaboration — a meeting of minds and interests online in an environment of mutual provision and gain that rewards reliability and trustworthiness. Until that sort of community fully develops, start by writing a good blog and posting testimonials from satisfied clients — you’ll get a solid marketing presence online, and for free.

Interestingly, though, I think there’s actually the germ of a good access-to-justice idea here, in terms of an online service that helps people determine if they have a case or not. You’d take the same basic template and have people submit enough details of their case to have its merits analyzed. But the analysis would be done by independent lawyers who wouldn’t be able to take on the case after offering their analysis of its merits, thereby removing the temptation for a lawyer who could derive business from the case to think there’s more to it than there actually is.

The lawyers offering these services could be volunteers, which would make it kind of a computerized version of the phone-in “Ask A Lawyer” programs provided by some state bars and law societies. But these programs tend to focus on answering legal questions and dispensing general advice rather than analyzing the merits of a specific case, which volunteer lawyers are loathe to do for both insurance and business-generation reasons. So I think it’d be better to staff this online system with salaried lawyers — perhaps through a legal aid or community service clinic.

Of course, the net result of a system like this would be the opposite of the WhoCanISue.com approach. That company wants to increase the number of lawsuits; this system could have the effect of reducing them. If potential litigants have a clearer picture of their chances of success at trial — and of the costs of getting there — you could end up with fewer frivolous suits jamming up the courts. And if it serves to reinforce in the public mind the idea that the court process is neither a cure-all for an unhappy life situation nor an outlet for frustration or vindictiveness, all the better.

You could even call the site DoIHaveACase.com. It’s not the future of legal marketing, but it might be one small pathway leading to a better justice system.