Whatever happened to Napster? Depending on your age, you might remember it either as a piracy-enabling nuisance, a groundbreaking music-swapping service, or the dusty antecedent of iTunes. Time magazine caught up with Napster’s founder, Shawn Fanning, and three other pioneering hackers in a recent article that describes them as “The Men Who Changed The World.” Between 1997 and 2001, Fanning, Bram Cohen, Justin Frankel and Jon Lech Johansen invented Napster, BitTorrent, Gnutella, and a range of DVD encryption-cracking software. If you’re not familiar with all these programs, suffice to say that they effectively ended vendors’ longstanding control over the distribution of their content.
The title of the piece is meant to be a little ironic, because not only were these four not “pirates” in any persuasive definition of the term (they’re all now associated with legitimate enterprises), but they also failed to usher in an era of universal free content exchange — and they deny that that was ever their intent. What they really wanted, the article suggests, was for content to be “free” in the sense of “freedom” — that the purchasers of content should be able to do what they liked with that content once they’ve purchased it.
But the article also suggests that these four men laid the groundwork for what has become the first successful — spectacularly successful — application of online content distribution: iTunes. Steve Jobs’ masterstroke succeeds where the likes of Napster and LimeWire and Gnutella failed for a host of reasons, including Apple’s steely negotiating skills and marketplace leverage gained through the success of the iPod. But a major factor in Apple’s success lay in the simple, accessible, appealing design of its products: as I’ve written elsewhere, ease of use and pleasing design is the hallmark of all Apple products, and is what I think will propel Apple to the top spot in the future world of online applications. The article’s writer expresses that sentiment with a thought so simple and powerful that it merits its own paragraph:
It turns out that there is something that can compete with free: easy.
That should be a jarring thought for the legal profession, because the same thing is happening to us. No, we’re not being threatened by a Legal Napster that will allow clients to swap legal products they’ve already purchased (not yet, anyway). The threat we’re facing is convenience: the ability of a client to access legal services in an easy, frictionless, and user-friendly manner. Law firms are not convenient vehicles for the development and sale of legal services — well, they’re convenient for lawyers, but not for clients. Law firms of all sizes, from solos to globals, are set up to render legal services in as time-consuming, remote and painstaking a way as possible, partly because it’s profitable, and partly because we’ve never cared all that much about the legal consumer experience.
Well, now it’s game on, because convenience is the battleground where our innovative competitors are massing their troops. These competitors don’t have expensive partners and premises and marketing budgets, and they can’t bring the resources to bear on the market that lawyers can. So they’ve taken different approaches, and one of those is to offer services that are much easier and more convenient for clients. And it turns out that ease and convenience are incredibly important for consumers who are stressed for time, overloaded with options, and in dire need of accessible, personalized attention to help them make their law-related choices.
Convenience is a major part of what LegalZoom sells — check out the pricing structure for many of their products, and you’ll notice that they charge a premium for overnight drafting and delivery of documents. Convenience is a key aspect of contract-assembly services like WhichDraft and Kenneth Adams’ brand-new entry, Koncision. Convenience lies behind the appeal of Allen & Overy’s just-unveiled online tool to track banking compensation laws worldwide. Convenience for the client — making the process of accessing legal services as easy and painless as possible — is the new killer app for this marketplace.
This development is the latest example of a longstanding rule of business finally infiltrating the legal world. It’s called the Buying Hierarchy, and it was first developed by Windermere Associates as a way of explaining the process consumers go through when making their market choices. It’s widely known from its citation in The Innovator’s Dilemma and is summed up nicely here:
Most customers follow a four-phase buying pattern, with only the last phase being based on price. These phases are as follows:
Functionality: Where a product or service meets a certain need or does a certain thing that cannot be accomplished in any other manner.
Reliability: When two or more competitors offer similar products that have the same functionality, consumers turn to the competitor whose product offers the better reliability.
Convenience: When competitors have products or services that offer the same functionality and the same relative reliability, consumers turn to convenience – those products that are the most convenient to use and the companies that are the most convenient to work with.
Price: When competitors all have similar products or services that offer all the attributes above in very similar manners, then the product or service essentially becomes a commodity and at that point must compete on price (following the schools of thought outlined above).
The legal marketplace long ago passed through the first two stages: functionality is widespread (you can find more than one lawyer or law firm in almost any jurisdiction that can carry out a given legal task) and so is reliability (you can also find more than one lawyer or firm that can be trusted to do excellent, reliable work on your legal task). But for decades, our marketplace has been stuck at convenience, and the reason for that is the one David Maister identified years ago: lawyers don’t need to innovate on practice management or client service because lawyers only have to compete with other lawyers.
Why bother adding all sorts of bells and whistles to make life easier for clients when you know full well that no other firm will force you to do so? Why bother investing in online service delivery, or training your lawyers to be fully responsive to client input, or creating systems that allow clients to access their ongoing legal purchases at a time and in a place and in a manner that suits their needs, not the firm’s? Why bother with convenience, when inconvenience is part of both the mystique and the profitability of the profession?
The answer, of course, is that we’re no longer competing just with each other. We’re competing with a host of providers — human and technological, local and foreign, lawyers and everyone else — who don’t make the same assumptions we do and who aren’t all working from the same decades-old playbook. If your firm hasn’t yet grasped the significance of the world’s largest legal information company buying the world’s largest legal process outsourcing company, grasp it now.
The ground rules have changed, and the Buying Hierarchy is coming to the legal marketplace. Convenience matters. Accessibility matters. Making things easy for the client matters. That’s the real New Normal we’re facing, and I suggest we respond to it with a little more urgency than we’ve shown so far. Because once convenience falls, as the Hierarchy demonstrates, the next and final stop on the road is price.
Rocket Lawyer
In your post “How to Kill a Law Firm” you mention Jack Welch’s response to innovative competitors. His managers
weren’t to prepare defenses against those innovations. They were to adopt them.”
One online legal services provider you omit, but is worth mention, is Rocket Lawyer. Rocket Lawyer creates “do it yourself” legal documents using something they call a document interview, which asks the document seeker a series of questions to build custom documents. He or she can then print the document from a home computer. Clients who complete a document often find they need the help of an attorney, at which point Rocket Lawyer connects them with an attorney in its network.
What’s interesting here is that Rocket Lawyer enables lawyers by referring them clients who otherwise would not seek an attorney (having already chosen a DIY solution instead.) Attorneys also look to Rocket Lawyer as a template service and virtual law practice platform. The company places lawyers in the path of potential clients looking for legal services online and gives them the tools to serve those clients conveniently.