Yesterday, I advanced the notion that lawyers’ profitability now depends on what they do and how they do it. One reason is disruptive internet-based providers that not only are grabbing commodity work and profiting from it, but more dangerously, are also changing the values clients associate with “good legal service” to emphasize speed, affordability and convenience, threatening to replace firms as platforms of choice for many legal services. Today, I’d like to look at parallel developments within the legal profession that further illustrate this point.
Earlier this year, I wrote about the stratified legal market and its implications, and more recently, for The Lawyers Weekly, I described the consequent need for law firms to do what they do best and outsource the rest. With a hat tip to John Wallbillich’s fee pyramid, I’ve put together the following rough approximation of what the market for legal services now looks like (click to enlarge):
So you have bet-the-company work at the top, ordinary course of business legal tasks in the middle, and low-value commodity work at the bottom (the stratified legal market post explores these tiers in more detail). The top tier is now shrinking — it’s probably on its way down to 10% of the total market — and the bottom layer is growing, soon to encompass about half of what clients need.
Clients enjoy seeing their legal needs settle into segments with different price points, but they still find most lawyers and law firms frustratingly amorphous and undifferentiated, both individually and collectively, in terms of skills, methods and attitudes. They sure would like to see the legal profession recognize and respond to the realities illustrated by this pyramid.
That’s why the news last week from CMS Cameron McKenna looks so significant. The London-based global firm announced that it was essentially outsourcing its entire immigration law department to an equally global but fully specialized immigration law firm, Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen and Loewy. Understand, Camerons isn’t sending some low-value aspects of immigration work to Fragomen — they’re sending everything, lawyers and all. Camerons will no longer provide immigration law services within its offices — but it will still provide those services to its clients, using Fragomen as its preferred supplier.
This, I need hardly tell you, is something new. It’s so new that we don’t have a verb for what Camerons has done. The Lawyer uses “divests” and “offloads,” LegalWeek uses “transfers” and “spins off,” Fragomen uses “acquires” and I used “outsourced,” but none of these really seems to fit. Fragomen is now a little bit Camerons, and Camerons is now a little bit Fragomen; they’ll always be separate entities but they’ll always be joined. We probably need a term borrowed not from business, but from biology.
John Wallbillich, again on the case, wonders if this is the end of the full-service law firm, and he may be right. But at the very least, it’s a major mutation in the full-service firm’s evolution. Camerons hasn’t abandoned immigration law altogether; it has simply recognized that immigration work was neither strategically nor financially significant enough to remain a core activity of the firm, yet was still important to the firm’s key clients. You solve a problem like that by figuring out what you do best and outsourcing the rest, which is exactly what Camerons did here. It’s closest to the Wave system pioneered by Lovells (as it then was), but a Wave circulates work from a major urban firm through smaller regional providers and back again; this is a different animal.
What we may be seeing, in addition to the evolution of the full-service firm, is the rise of the super-boutique. Fragomen, as Ron Friedmann explains, is a walking illustration of what he calls Law Factory principles:
- Focus on a single practice: with 250 lawyers, it is much bigger than its next biggest immigration firm competitor at 35 lawyers.
- Handle high volumes: it has handled 50,000 immigration transactions annually for 3 years.
- Keep overhead low: its offices are not fancy (and until a then-recent move, the offices sounded pretty shabby).
- Leverage non-lawyer professionals: the firm has more than 500 paralegals, putting the ratio to lawyers at more than 2:1.
- Work on fixed fees: 95% of its work is charged on a flat-fee basis.
- Take legal technology seriously: the firm has provided web-access to case files for more than 10 years; its paralegals have access to a digital best practices library of key flowcharts.
- Keep lawyer pay in check: new associates earn $125k, not $160k and do not come from top-tier schools.
- Be global: the factory is global with 15% of work outside the USA.
You know what leaps out at me from that list? Fixed-fee work is ninety-five percent of Fragomen’s business. You can charge fixed fees when you only practise one type of law and come to know the area intimately; you have to charge fixed fees when your margins are so thin that you need to know exactly how much it costs you to carry out a given task. That’s the world Fragomen lives in, and it has adapted itself accordingly. It’s a world foreign to most law firms, who like to do everything and charge it all at cost-plus. But it’s a world that’s growing.
Take a look at the insurance defence bar, at least in the UK (which, thanks almost entirely to the Legal Services Act, is now the world’s legal laboratory). This article in The Lawyer describes the rise of insurance defence mega-firms, most recently highlighted by Clyde & Co.’s merger with (acquisition of) Barlow Lyde & Gilbert to produce a firm with 280 partners and revenue just south of half a billion dollars. Think about that for a second: $500 million a year largely from insurance defence work, possibly the least remunerative and most demanding corporate legal practice area in existence. And that merger simply lets the new firm tackle rivals that are about to grow in a hurry: Irwin Mitchell (soon to convert to an ABS), Parabis Law and Minster Law (both with aspirations in that area). Says The Lawyer:
This change is being driven by savvy in-house counsel, who can see financial savings to be made from their service providers. … Clydes chief executive Peter Hasson said the merger was driven in part by the anticipated reduction in panel places for global insurers. “The insurance industry is consolidating suppliers on a global basis. The UK insurance industry is much more international. Our clients are saying, ’We’ve just opened in Canada – we want you there’,” he said. [And so Clydes is, recently acquiring Montreal-based Nicholl Paskell-Mede to become the second global firm to enter Canada.] …
The insurance legal market is changing the way legal services are being delivered. This is a change that is being driven by the volume markets squeezing profit margins and forcing their peers to play a different game. Consolidation can only continue in this sector for a limited time before it starts to seep into other key legal areas.
And so it will. Take a look at Littler Mendelson, 71st in the 2011 AmLaw 100 with 750 lawyers in 50 offices across the US and annual revenue of $381 million, and the only thing it does is labour and employment law. Like other super-boutiques, Littler is a sharp, savvy firm that knows how to maximize the value of its investments. Just as an example, read this description of Littler’s CaseSmart system, nominated for an InnovAction Award this year:
“[It] streamlines the way that cases are managed and provides attorneys with a ‘smart system’ designed to anticipate their needs as they investigate facts, conduct research, prepare responsive documentation and perform their legal and risk analyses. The system also provides clients transparent, online access to information about the status of their individual legal matters, as well as key performance indicators regarding the overall work being performed in this system.”
How many full-service law firms do you suppose create and support something like this? Not many. Yet firms like Littler, Clydes and Fragomen make investments like these, because they’re responding to the realities of a legal marketplace that demands better and more cost-effective ways of producing legal work. That’s why Camerons’ move is so significant: it has created a visceral and structured relationship with a super-boutique, increasing its effective reach and capacity while simultaneously reducing its size and spend. That’s a pretty neat trick, one that other firms may find hard to duplicate.
So we come back to the theme at the start of this post: how do lawyers and law firms ensure their profitability in this environment? That’s going to take more space and time than I have right now, so it looks like this series will have to stretch to Part 3 next week.
But I want to emphasize the trend that seems to me undeniable: as commodity work grows in volume, more law firms are stepping up to take that work and profit from it through a relentless focus on volume, specialization and systematization. Go back to the pyramid: these firms are eventually going to dominate that third tier of client work (or at least, that percentage of the work that doesn’t leave the legal profession altogether). The first tier, mission-critical work, is shrinking, and the very top law firms have already locked in on it.
What’s left for the vast majority of non-specialist law firms? What do they get? In my opinion, they get an existential crisis. More on that next week.
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.
Goodbye to all that
Last week, having written about the rise of online disruptors and the emergence of super-boutiques, I promised that the final entry in this de facto trilogy would identify how lawyers and law firms can ensure their profitability in this new environment. But then I spent three days at ILTA’s Rev-elation, the 2011 annual meeting of the International Legal Technology Association, and it seems to me that that ship is already sailing out of the port.
What I saw and heard at ILTA, about document assembly and contract standardization and reverse auctions and KM advances and outsourcing services and a host of other developments, is that the storm we’ve been warning about for the past few years has finally broken (read the linked articles for more details). Tired of waiting for law firms to lead change, the market has itself developed tools and processes to provide the certainty, efficiency, transparency and cost-effectiveness that legal services have long needed. Clients love these innovations and are telling law firms to use them, even (and especially) where they conflict with firms’ traditional ways of working and making money. And firms are obeying, with the vague but dawning realization that they’re now being told how to do their jobs.
What’s happening is this: law firms are finally losing control of the legal marketplace.
Law firms used to dictate the terms upon which legal services were performed — work assignment, work flow, scheduling, timeliness, format, delivery, billing, pricing, and many others — because buyers had no other options. Those options have now emerged, powered by technology and driven forward by market demand.
But the emergence of these options isn’t the real story. The real story is that firms are buying these new products and services, not selling them. They’re taking marching orders about their use, not issuing them. They’re accepting the new realities of the marketplace, not inventing them. Law firms are now drifting to the periphery of the marketplace, trading places with technology-driven outsiders whose own importance increases daily. Law firms, whether they realize it or not, are settling into a new role: sources of valued specialists called upon to perform certain tasks within a larger legal system that they did not create and that they do not control.
New providers and new technologies are not going to replace lawyers. But they are going to marginalize lawyers and render law firms mostly irrelevant.
Lawyers are smart, knowledgeable, creative and trustworthy professionals who, unfortunately, suffer from poor business acumen, terrible management skills, wildly disproportionate aversion to risk, outsized revenue expectations, and a business model about 25 years out of date. The market won’t abandon them — they have unique and sometimes extraordinarily valuable skills and characteristics — but it will find the best use for them: expert specialists with limited influence over the larger process.
Law firms are widely decentralized partnerships that charge on a cost-plus basis, retain no earnings from year to year, and pray every morning that their best assets will walk back through the same doors they exited the previous night. That’s not good enough. The new legal market demands systematization, collaboration, transparency, alignment, efficiency and cost-effectiveness within and among its providers. A few law firms have already adapted these traits, and some more will follow. Some law firms are so powerful they won’t have to change. The rest are in grave danger.
Here’s a revealing thought experiment to illustrate these points. Consider the flurry of investments and acquisitions that have taken place in the legal technology area recently. I’ve already written about Google Ventures’ $18 million investment in Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom’s acquisition of $66 million in venture funding. During ILTA, Aderant acquired Client Services and CompuLaw for an undisclosed but certainly massive sum. And in the biggest news of the week, Hewlett-Packard purchased Autonomy, which among other things is a leading e-discovery provider, for no less than $10 billion.
With those figures in mind, ask yourself: what would you pay for a law firm? What price would you meet for any of the world’s ten largest law firms? Some very smart people discussed that question during a conversation at ILTA, and we reached this likely conclusion: nothing. Not a cent. Because really, what do law firms have to sell? They have no patents. They have no unique business methods. They have little unique knowledge. They have few long-term client commitments under contract. They have limited goodwill. Their only real assets are a handful of partners with great technical expertise or amazing rainmaking skills, and these assets can leave anytime with no penalty. What, precisely, would you be buying?
I said at the outset of these posts that lawyers and law firms need to decide carefully what they do and how they do it if they want to remain profitable and valuable. Let me instead suggest more questions for lawyers and law firms to ask themselves in order to even remain in the conversation.
What: Identify your inventory — what you sell to clients — and determine how much of it involves the application of lawyers’ high-value performance or analytical skills. Assume that the price for everything else you sell will plummet, and that you’ll be able to stay in these markets only if you adopt various high-efficiency systems. Absorb the reality that you will need many fewer people within your law firm to be competitive in these areas.
How: Study the means by which you accomplish the work you sell to clients and determine whether and to what extent you can adopt new technologies and processes to be not just more efficient, but also more effective in terms of quality, relevance and responsiveness. Don’t think in terms of adapting your current approaches; think in terms of starting from scratch. Use your creativity and ask: How should we go about doing what we do?
Who: Identify every person who receives a salary or a draw from your firm and ask: what is their primary contribution to the firm? Good answers will include proven business development skills, outstanding professional expertise, and amazing management abilities. These are your irreplaceables, and you’re probably underpaying them. Everyone else will require a clear demonstration of why they occupy a place in your office.
Where: In association with the previous entry, determine the best physical location for the services you provide. We are past the time in which a law firm’s four walls house all or almost all of its functionality. Some services might best be performed in a suburban location, others in a home office, others in a low-cost center elsewhere in the country or in the world, and others from a server farm.
Why: This might be the most important question of all, and I posed it in an article last month: what is the point of your law firm? I don’t mean generating profits for partners; I mean your marketplace purpose. Why do you exist? What specific need for what specific audience do you meet? If you disappeared tomorrow, who would find the loss irreplaceable? Believe me when I say: The market is asking you that question right now.
We’ve begun crossing over from the old legal marketplace to the new one. Lawyers still have outstanding value to offer in certain quarters, but we need to concentrate our market offerings around that value, and we need better platforms for our services than traditional law firms provide. We need to understand what technology is doing to legal services and either adopt that technology, adapt to the client expectations it’s creating, or leave. We need to understand our role in this new market and appreciate that it does not lie at the center of the legal universe. We’ve missed our chance to lead the new market, but we can still flourish inside it. It’s up to us.
Welcome to the crucible.
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.