Like Thomas Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell before him, Chris Anderson is becoming known for books that identify and name an evolving trend that connects business and society. You’ve probably read or head about his newest book Free: the Future of a Radical Price. It’s generating a tremendous amount of heat around the idea that the cost of many things is heading towards zero and the price of those things is following. Reviews from established providers have ranged from mixed (The New York Times and The Economist, to name two) to devastating (Gladwell himself in The New Yorker), while reaction from the blogosphere and Twitterati has, not surprisingly, been far more positive.

I try not to talk about books I haven’t read, and Free is still on my to-get list. But I did read the lengthy excerpt published in Anderson’s magazine Wired last February, and it seems to capture the book’s arguments nicely (and for free, no less). The gist is that technological advances have made the cost of creating one more copy of many products (the marginal cost) and the cost of distributing those products so small that they are effectively zero. Content that can be rendered digitally (almost all of it) is accordingly “too cheap to meter,” which in any kind of open marketplace means that competition will cut the price of those products to virtually nothing.

Of course, not everything falls into this category: products like shoes and TVs aren’t heading towards free. And even for products whose marginal costs are nearly nothing, that’s not the end of the story, as the Times review notes:

More precisely, the marginal cost of digital products, or the cost of delivering one additional copy, is approaching zero. The fixed cost of producing the first copy, however, may be as high as ever. All those servers and transmission lines, as cheap as they may be per gigabyte, require large initial investments. The articles still have to be written, the songs recorded, the movies made. The crucial business question, then, is how you cover those fixed costs. As many an airline bankruptcy demonstrates, it can be extremely hard to survive in a business with high fixed costs, low marginal costs and relatively easy entry. As long as serving one new customer costs next to nothing, the competition to attract as many customers as possible will drive prices toward zero. And zero doesn’t pay the bills.

Interesting as all this is, what does it have to do with the legal profession? Potentially, a great deal, as some legal bloggers have noted. Carolyn Elefant and Doug Cornelius both point to innovative new offerings from two well-known US law firms: Wilson Sonsini has set up an online term sheet generator, while Orrick has created a start-up forms library on its website. Both of these products (or are they services?) are entirely free, to anyone (client, non-client, other lawyer) who wants to use them. They’re also products from which these firms and others have traditionally made money. “But there’s a method to Orrick’s apparent madness,” Carolyn writes:

Orrick’s freebies help it capture a segment of the market which either couldn’t afford to hire Orrick or if they could, would not have  been worth Orrick’s time.  Consider the example of a small business — typically the type of client outside of biglaw’s demographic.   The business might download and fill in Orrick’s incorporation form and then say to itself “I’ve already filled out the data.  How much could it cost to pay an Orrick attorney to look this over?”  Likewise, Orrick could charge far less to eyeball a completed form which it prepared itself than if the firm were to begin the incorporation from scratch (in which case, it would have to invite the client to the office, interview the client, gather the data and prepare the incorporation papers).

Meanwhile, Doug points out that many law firms have already adopted the philosophy of Free, in their own law firm newsletters and “client alerts”:

When you had to mail these alerts, there was a dollar cost associated with that distribution. To better phrase that, there was a stamp cost associated with distribution. Now distribution are costs are minimal. The costs are the same whether you email it to 500 people or 50,000 people. The same is true with viewing it on the law firm’s website. … Lawyers and their firms are giving away this valuable legal insight in the hopes that you will hire them to represent you in a matter related to the information in their publication. They use the publications to showcase their expertise, but in the process give away some of their substantive knowledge.

Giving away something for free or ultra-cheap in hopes you’ll entice users to buy your other services is not a new phenomenon, even in law: smaller firms have been using items like wills as “loss leaders” for years. What’s significant here is what’s being given away.

Legal forms aren’t matchbooks or Bic pens — or at least, they didn’t use to be: they were once important elements of the lawyer’s inventory that required a lawyer’s skills. The fact that they’re now customizable and downloadable on the Net tells us that the skill to produce them is now available widely. That implies a lack of scarcity and a consequent inability to charge much of a price. Legal knowledge, as Doug points out, is already being given away free by law firms; now, it appears that legal processes like document creation are following suit.

But it’s not law firms like Wilson and Orrick leading the charge and blazing this trial; it’s non-lawyer entities. Companies like LegalZoom sell forms for low prices; start-ups like WhichDraft give them away for free; most tellingly of all, services like JD Supra encourage lawyers to donate them to the profession at large as, among other things, a marketing tool. “Lawyers need to recognize,” Carolyn notes, “that we are fast reaching a point where the kinds of forms that companies like LegalZoom offer – such as contracts, leases, incorporations and wills – may be available online to all for free.”

Lawyers’ marginal cost of document preparation has always been low, but in the absence of other alternatives for clients, document-focused products could be sold at a profit. Now, thanks to the Free effect, the marketplace value of these sorts of products — their price, in other words — reflects their marginal cost. That’s great for clients; it’s bad for a lot of lawyers. Specifically, it’s terrible news for lawyers whose practices depend on the creation and sale of documents, contracts, agreements and anything else that can be digitized, templated and algorithmed. In other words, for many general practitioners.

Think of the services your typical general practitioner provides: wills, incorporations, divorce papers, leases, standard contracts and so on. If all these things aren’t yet available for little or for nothing on the web, they soon will be. How will the lawyers who rely on this kind of work survive? If they can offer more in-depth services in a given area, they could give away the documents in hopes of attracting that higher-end paying work. Jay Flesichman explains:

Would you prepare the divorce paperwork if you could make the money in another fashion? Say, on a new estate plan for the client? Would you draft bankruptcy petitions at no cost if it would cause the client to pay you for post-petition services and give you the chance to handle all of the lucrative fee-shifting adversary proceedings that come out of the bankruptcy case? … [In bankruptcy,] the consultation is often free as a way to get the prospect in the door.  Maybe the credit report is free.  Perhaps credit counseling is built into the price, making it free.  But not much else.

The thing of it is, though, if you could provide these in-depth services, by definition you wouldn’t be a general practitioner. That’s why the future for GPs looks incredibly grim: there’s just no profit to be had in providing a wide range of basic legal services. And I’m not talking just or even exclusively about solos: urban office towers are filled with lawyers whose working days are spent creating and reviewing corporate forms and documents. They might be exquisitely complicated forms. They might involve huge sums of money. But they’re still forms and documents, and if the wave of this kind of work heading to India wasn’t a big enough clue as to its marketplace value, the people at Wilson Sonsini and Orrick are making it crystal clear.

Inevitably, the term “commoditization” is going to enter this conversation, and Jay Parkhill makes the connection from Free to Richard Susskind. In The End of Lawyers?, Richard is careful to mark five stops on the route from bespoke to commoditized work, including standardized, systematized and packaged work. For legal tasks, he wrote, a commodity is “an IT-based offering that is undifferentiated in the marketplace (undifferentiated in the minds of the recipients and not the providers of the service). For any given commodity, there may be very similar competitor products, or the product is so commonplace that it is distributed at low or no cost.” We seem to have reached the point where legal document work is becoming entrenched in the packaged and commoditized areas.

What this all comes down to is this: if your main source of value is your ability to craft a legal document — if you rely heavily on products with a very low marginal cost — you could be in serious trouble. And it may only have begun: recall the NYT review of Free that noted: it can be extremely hard to survive in a business with high fixed costs, low marginal costs and relatively easy entry.

Law firms have traditionally had high fixed costs — expensive lawyers and prime real estate, principally. Many practice areas have low marginal costs — once you’ve drawn up a prospectus for one client, you’re 70% of the way to drawing one up for the next one. What’s missing from the equation is the relatively easy entry: lawyers still decide who can offer legal services, and we prosecute for the unauthorized practice of law those whom we decide can’t. If that barrier ever falls, look out.