The firms of the future

“Does the future belong to virtual law firms?” That question was posed by an American Lawyer article earlier this week that focused on Virtual Law Partners, a growing firm nominally based in Silicon Valley but in fact operating, well, wherever its lawyers are. Virtual firms — two others, FSB Legal Counsel and Rimon Law Group, are also cited — consist of partners who operate independently, charging rates well below what they would require were they (still) at large firms and profiting by the huge savings in overhead and other costs.

The lawyers operate remotely, but they tap into a larger infrastructure with centralized billing, IT support, marketing, and recruiting efforts. They also share work frequently, communicating through video chat or e-mail as needed. Technology companies and startups were early converts, but the firms have added lawyers with varying expertise, including employment, real estate; FSB has even started a litigation practice.

Answering the article’s eponymous question in the negative was Patrick J. Lamb, who operates a bricks-and-mortar but nonetheless highly innovative firm at Valorem Law. He suggests that virtual firms suffer by comparison to boutiques thanks to one key difference.

The difference?  The ability to aggressively collaborate. Even with the best communication hardware, there is something lost when you can’t go next door and bounce ideas off someone who may have nothing to do with the case but who is vested in its outcome. I’ve experience firsthand the accelerated evolution of ideas from really good to extraordinary when several experienced minds combine their talent and judgment and work through a problem.

Speaking for myself, it’s not clear to me how a partner in a virtual law firm differs meaningfully from a well-connected high-tech sole practitioner. Both run their own practices in a highly personalized and streamlined environment, often rely on cloud-based infrastructure to manage their practices, set their own rules for client relationships, and operate with an unusual degree of autonomy. I think virtual firms aren’t cyberspace versions of traditional law firms so much as they’re loose aggregations of like-minded solos under a common banner that happens to be hung on the internet.

So I don’t think virtual firms are the future. But I do think they’re a future. More specifically, they’re one of a growing number of law firm models that will all be able to flourish in the next couple of decades. That’s because what we’re really seeing here is the demise of the traditional cookie-cutter law firm as the default setting for legal service enterprises.

One of the great things about the current upheaval in the legal marketplace is that the old expectations and parameters of law firms are losing their iron grip on the profession. Look, for example, at FutureFirm 1.0, a two-day competition this past April to take a tired traditional law firm called Marbury Madison LLP and overhaul it for the 21st century. Hosted by Prof. William Henderson at the University of Indiana Maurer Faculty of Law, FutureFirms attracted some of the most innovative minds in practice, the corporate world and academia. The event produced a blueprint for redefining large law firms that includes alternative fees, merit-based compensation and risk-sharing with clients — and they’ll do it again next year.

Or take a look at a forthcoming article in the CBA’s National magazine (which, full disclosure, I edit) titled “2020 Vision,” written by lawyer and Legal Post blogger Mitch Kowalski. It looks back from the year 2020 at the development of a very different (and hugely successful) law firm called BFC Law Professional Corporation that abandoned most of the trappings of the traditional firm. Of particular note for our purposes is the future firm’s “hub-and-spoke” approach to its physical premises:

The Hub
We maintain meeting room space downtown (the Hub), equipped with staff, computers and the like. This space also contains hoteling niches where lawyers have workspace and telephone/internet access. Remember, all our systems are cloud-based, so lawyers and staff can work anywhere. Office management handles all boardroom and hoteling niche bookings.

The Spoke
BFC’s day-to-day legal work is done at a public transit-accessible location outside the downtown core (the Spoke). Not only is rent much cheaper there, our staff and lawyers find the Spoke to be closer to their homes,  which reduces their travel time and increases their quality of life. In the Spoke, we have moved away from separate offices for lawyers,  which allows for the efficient use of smaller rentable space with better HVAC flow (further reducing costs). Small meeting rooms throughout the Spoke accommodate privacy as needed.

What the virtual law firm, Marbury Madison, and BFC Law all have in common is that they’re different and quite realistic visions of how lawyers can come together to offer legal services to the marketplace. They reject, or at least test severely, the standing assumptions about how a law firm should be constructed, both physically in terms of its premises and organizationally in terms of its clients and employees. In doing so, they reflect our evolving understanding within the profession of just what a law firm is supposed to look like.

We have this funny little idea in the law that the nature of your work and the quality of your practice are heavily influenced by the physical environment in which you operate. Are you on the 40th floor of a steel and glass tower in an urban center? You must be doing intricate, high-end, bespoke work for multinational clients. Are you in a nice but inconspicuous brick building with a wooden front door and creaky floorboards in an exurban community? You must be doing basic, commoditized work for unsophisticated clients. Lawyers love to judge people, and the people we love judging the most are each other, using criteria that reveal more about our own assumptions and biases than anything else. What the rise of the virtual law firm really signifies is that those assumptions, at least in terms of law firm structure, should soon be fading away.

In fact, if the form that a law firm takes will be influenced by anyone, it’s going to be clients, not lawyers. Both clients and lawyers — but especially lawyers — are very used to the idea that “they” come to see “us” in a place and at a time of our choosing. That simple unconscious assumption sets the tone for all relations that follow between the two parties. Lawyers have always had home-field advantage over clients, and we like it that way.

Now, the gravitational pull is starting to run the other way. As clients’ influence grows, so too will their ability to draw us to them, rather than vice versa. That doesn’t have to mean house calls — although it might — but it does mean that law firms will feel more obliged to arrange their physical availability in ways that increase convenience to clients. “Lawyers on demand,” a little like time-shifted TV shows? It’s not a preposterous result, and even thinking about it prepares us to better adjust to future client relationships where we don’t get to set all the ground rules from the start.

Yesterday’s law firm selection was a boxed lunch packed by lawyers; tomorrow’s is going to be a lavish buffet with clients standing in line next to you while you choose. For all that we still need to work on diversity within law firms, it’s going to be nice to have a little diversity of law firms as well.



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