Are you selling the lawyer or the firm?

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Posted in: Big Firms, Marketing, Solo & Small Firm, Talent

From England and Wales, the newest hotbed of innovation in the current legal marketplace, comes word that the first nationwide solicitor franchise is on its way. Legal Futures reports that Face2Face Solicitors “is initially aimed at small private client law firms and will provide franchisee solicitors with centralized back-office systems – including accounts, IT and regulatory compliance – and central marketing and business development, to enable them to focus on the legal work.” Face2Face would seem to fit the Alternative Business Structures model very well, and in fact, the company plans to register as an ABS when the starting gun sounds October 6.

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.

Canada’s Big Bang

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Posted in: Big Firms, Globalization

Earlier this fall, I gave a presentation to a Canadian law society that described the key trends in the current legal marketplace and forecast where they’re likely to lead in future. As part of the presentation, we discussed a series of hypothetical future developments that would require the profession’s regulators to respond. One of them went like this:

A new legal services company, GlobalLaw Inc., has risen suddenly and dramatically. Based in London, it has taken advantage of the non-lawyer equity provisions of the Legal Services Act to collect massive amounts of capital from investment banks. With this money, GlobalLaw has bought law firms and hired lawyers worldwide, created a huge and sophisticated online service infrastructure, and marketed itself aggressively in multiple jurisdictions. GlobalLaw has now announced plans to buy mid-sized firms in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal simultaneously, and to re-brand and operate them all as GlobalLaw offices. What do you do?

That scenario stopped being hypothetical yesterday, with the bombshell announcement by UK-based global law firm Norton Rose that it was merging with South Africa’s Deneys Reitz and Canada’s Ogilvy Renault. You can read the details in any number of places, including The American Lawyer, LegalWeek, the WSJ Law Blog, the Financial Post, and The Globe & Mail — a range of international coverage that underlines the fact that this, as Joe Biden might say, is a big freakin’ deal.

Norton Rose started the day with close to 2,000 lawyers in 31 cities on three continents, whereas Deneys and Ogilvy together total about 600 attorneys in eight cities, so this looks more like strategic acquisitions as part of a global expansion than a merger of near-equals. I can’t speak to the South African side of this deal, and I’m not even that interested in the logic of the moves from the firms’ respective strategic perspectives (though it sure looks sound to me). What I’m most interested in today is the impact of this development on Canada’s legal marketplace, which I think will be extraordinary.

Some context is necessary, especially if you’re not from around these parts: nothing like this has happened in the Canadian legal marketplace before. Baker & McKenzie was the first “global” firm to come to Canada, but its Toronto office opened in 1962, virtually the Mesozoic Era in law firm history. In 1999, Tory Tory DesLauriers & Binnington consummated Canada’s first (and to date only) cross-border merger with New York’s Haythe & Curley, a union that took something of a star-crossed turn for both firms. In 2008, pulses quickened briefly on a report, immediately denied by all parties, that DLA Piper was in talks with national giant Fasken Martineau DuMoulin. And that’s pretty much the entire notable history of foreign forays into the Canadian legal market, until yesterday.

So you can understand why much of Canada’s legal profession looked like a poleaxed mule when this news broke. Before yesterday, the largest law firm in Canada was Borden Ladner Gervais with 753 lawyers; with this merger, Norton Rose will have more than three times that number. The Canadian firm with the most overseas offices was Macleod Dixon with four, followed by Faskens with three; Norton Rose will soon have nearly 35 offices outside Canada. This is like Gulliver buying a house in Lilliput; or, to borrow a metaphor from the US-Canada relationship, like the elephant moving in next to the mice. This is the world arriving on your doorstep without calling ahead — all the talk about globalization suddenly turned into the reality of a legal behemoth setting up shop down the street.

Norton Rose OR (as the new firm will be officially known) seems likely to affect the Canadian marketplace in a number of ways. Obviously, with a critical mass of lawyers in cities across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Australasia, Norton Rose will be a serious contender to pick up Canadian multinational clients (or the Canadian work of multinationals with head offices elsewhere). That platform will be equally attractive to potential lateral hires at other Canadian firms who’ll want to know whether there are wider horizons than those they’re currently flying. Aside from possible client and partner losses, incumbent Canadian firms will also be faced with new management pressures: as the Legal Post‘s Mitch Kowalksi points out, Norton Rose brings unprecedented financial transparency (the firm makes its annual report public) as well as superior knowledge management and online services to Canada. All of this changes the competitive calculus of a law firm marketplace that traditionally has behaved more like a cozy fraternity of genteel rivals.

I can see two other Canadian impacts flowing from this merger. The first is the fact that a precedent for global mergers has now been set, and precedent is both a reassuring and a galvanizing strategic force: nothing motivates a law firm more than removing the fear of going first while simultaneously creating the fear of going last. Will we see a stampede of Canadian firms rushing into global mergers? Not likely. But a lot of executive committees will meet to talk about what this merger means for them and whether there are similar overseas opportunities that their firms must now consider. There’s been a sense here that there are too many large firms in Canada for a population and a capital base this size: the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan notwithstanding, this country is not and isn’t likely to become the world’s corporate headquarters. Some people think that if the law of conflicts of interest were loosened, a wave of national mergers would soon follow. This is a marketplace more than ready for change and consolidation.

But here’s something else to think about: Norton Rose is on a major expansion tear. Last June, the firm made headlines when it merged with Australia’s well-regarded Deacons. Deneys Reitz itself was Chambers’ African Law Firm of the Year in 2006 and maintains a strong commercial law presence in the continent’s biggest economy. (It’s beyond debate that Norton Rose must be looking very hard at potential US merger partners as we speak.) Ogilvy Renault is not a “national” firm as we understand the term — it has little presence west of Toronto (though its Calgary office, opened last year, has grown to eight lawyers), and it still houses more lawyers in Quebec’s capital (Quebec City) than in Canada’s (Ottawa). But it represents global companies like Bombardier, SNC Lavalin and Royal Bank of Canada, and is widely considered a “blue chip” firm within the Canadian profession.

All of which is to say, each of these three firms brought serious credentials to the table, yet each agreed to give up their names and identities to join another firm. So we’re learning that global platform matters, and global capacity matters, and maybe above all, global brand matters — we might very well be on our way to the Legal Transformation Project‘s suggested outcome of a future filled with megafirms and boutiques.

But we might also keep this in mind: the Alternative Business Structure (ABS) provisions of the UK’s Legal Services Act come into effect next fall, and any law firm aiming to be a global powerhouse would want to consider all available options to finance and pursue such a strategy. And I do know this: any global law firm with an office in Canada and with access to global private capital would turn this country’s legal profession upside down, from acquiring talent to investing in online infrastructure to marketing its brand to forcing law societies across Canada to look hard at regulations surrounding non-lawyer investment in or ownership of law firms.

This is all extremely early days yet, and the merger won’t even take effect until next June. But my feeling is that something very big happened in this country’s legal profession yesterday. The sudden deregulation of financial markets in England on October 27, 1986, has come to be called the “Big Bang,” and the coming introduction of ABSs in England & Wales on October 6, 2011, has already been anointed as the legal profession’s own explosion. Well, that was one very loud sound we heard across Canada on November 15, 2010.

Destroying your own business

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Posted in: Big Firms, Competition, Innovation

Well before Blockbuster Video actually filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this fall, The Onion produced a prescient video about a museum tour based on the movie rental chain: Historic ‘Blockbuster’ Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past. One dazzled visitor remarks: “It’s like stepping into a time machine … it’s hard to believe people used to live this way.” The whole feature is well worth the two minutes, but the sting comes at the end, as the anchor adds: “Blockbuster joins a growing number of historical sites, including Buffalo, New York’s re-creation of a Virgin Records music store and Iowa City’s Borders Bookstore Museum.”

The only thing more striking than the dismantling of these former powerhouse franchises is the speed at which they’re coming apart. Blockbuster, Virgin and Borders were corporate giants with global reach and massive brand strength. Yet today, when you think of videos, music and books, you first think of Netflix, iTunes and Amazon, companies that launched in 2001, 1999 and 1995, respectively. How did the mighty fall so swiftly?

James Surowiecki asks that very question in a recent New Yorker column, citing not just Blockbuster but other former “category killers” like Home Depot, Toys R Us, and Circuit City, companies that dominated the “big-box” developments that spread like wildfire throughout suburbia over the last few decades. These stores were also giants in their day, but today each is either struggling badly in the new economy or has already sunk beneath the waves. Surowiecki puts his finger on the problem in three paragraphs that every law firm leader should read and take to heart:

The problem — in Blockbuster’s case, at least — was that the very features that people thought were strengths turned out to be weaknesses. Blockbuster’s huge investment, both literally and psychologically, in traditional stores made it slow to recognize the Web’s importance: in 2002, it was still calling the Net a “niche” market. And it wasn’t just the Net. Blockbuster was late on everything — online rentals, Redbox-style kiosks, streaming video.

There was a time when customers had few alternatives, so they tolerated the chain’s limited stock, exorbitant late fees … and absence of good advice about what to watch. But, once Netflix came along, it became clear that you could have tremendous variety, keep movies as long as you liked, and, thanks to the Netflix recommendation engine, actually get some serviceable advice. (Places like Netflix and Amazon have demonstrated the great irony that computer algorithms can provide a more personalized and engaging customer experience than many physical stores.) …

Why didn’t Blockbuster evolve more quickly? In part, it was because of what you could call the “internal constituency” problem: the company was full of people who had been there when bricks-and-mortar stores were hugely profitable, and who couldn’t believe that those days were gone for good. Blockbuster treated its thousands of stores as if they were a protective moat, when in fact they were the business equivalent of the Maginot Line.

What happened to Blockbuster and Virgin and Circuit City is now starting to happen to law firms, for all the same reasons. Firms have invested heavily in legacy costs like long-term leases of downtown offices with rich interiors, and have resolutely refused to take the internet seriously as a service delivery vehicle. They have thrived from the absence of client choice, but will suffer as new competitors offer more options and, ironically, more personalized service. Firms aren’t evolving because they can’t evolve: the lawyers within these firms are so invested financially and emotionally in the old structure that they can’t believe things could change.

It’s difficult to see how the outcome for our profession will be any different, because like Blockbuster, we aren’t even trying to adapt. Almost all the innovation in the legal marketplace is now taking place outside of law firms or on their periphery. Contract lawyers work from home, legal process outsourcers work from Mumbai or Manila, LegalZoom works entirely on the internet — these entities are the drivers of change today. The happy result for clients is a fractured marketplace in which they’ll have their choice of which providers to provide which services in which priority.

If you want to see what the client of the future looks like, in fact, take a good look at Colt Technology Services, a UK-based Europe-wide IT company profiled this week in The Lawyer. Colt’s GC uses a combination of providers, including law firms, an offshore captive operation, contract lawyers, and Berwin Leighton Paisner’s revolutionary Lawyers On Demand service, to meet his company’s legal needs. This is an established client trend towards using a portfolio of legal providers, and law firms should be aware of it by now.

But what really concerns me is this: where is the strategic response from law firms to the revolution outside their gates? Where are the signs that firms recognize the existential threats to their marketplace position and are reacting accordingly?

Here’s an example: last month, Bloomberg BusinessWeek published a cover story about Diapers.com, a sort of Amazon.com for baby and infant products that looked to be the next evolution in online shopping. Its founders were quoted in the article as saying they’d welcome a price war with Amazon, and the article was in fact titled “What Amazon Fears Most.” This week, Amazon announced it had bought out Diapers.com for a truly stunning $545 million. That is how you handle upstart competition that threatens your market position.

So what are law firms, facing the same kind of threat, doing these days? Merging with each other, of course: mergers within the United States, within Canada and across the Atlantic, with more surely to come. Same old response, same old thinking. Where are the law firms buying out LPOs and bringing them in-house? Where are the law firms adapting the online delivery methods of startups? Where are the law firms that recognize the peril of their position and are moving to thwart, or to transform themselves into, their smaller, swifter, hungrier new rivals? They’re nowhere to be found, and that’s why the future of law firms looks a lot more like Blockbuster than Netflix.

Surowiecki concludes his article with an observation that readers of The Innovator’s Dilemma will find familiar: “Sometimes you have to destroy your business to save it.” Law firms, unfortunately for them, don’t come with self-destruct buttons.

The platform is changing

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Posted in: Big Firms, Competition, Innovation

Seth Godin calls it the WordPerfect Axiom, and he’s exactly right: When the platform changes, the leaders change.

WordPerfect had a virtual monopoly on word processing in big firms that used DOS. Then Windows arrived and the folks at WordPerfect didn’t feel the need to hurry in porting themselves to the new platform. They had achieved lock-in after all, and why support Microsoft. In less than a year, they were toast.

When the game machine platform of choice switches from Sony to xBox to Nintendo, etc., the list of bestelling games change and new companies become dominant. When the platform for music shifted from record stores to iTunes, the power shifted too, and many labels were crushed.

Again and again the same rules apply. In fact, they always do. When the platform changes, the deck gets shuffled. …  Insiders become outsiders and new opportunities abound.

This is happening, right now, in the legal services marketplace. The platform for legal service delivery is changing, and if you’re standing on it — and most lawyers are — you’re going to find it very difficult to keep your balance.  The platform used to be the traditional, top-down, hourly-billing, pyramidic law firm, where lawyers set the parameters for where, how, and at what price their services would be made available. Other potential platforms were either underfunded, impractical, or unauthorized. The legal profession as we know it today grew up secure and well-fed on this platform and has flourished as a result. Now, a platform shift is occurring.

We’ve already felt some tremors; now the full-scale quakes are arriving. Howrey LLP is preparing to cut 10% of its partnership after experiencing a 35% drop in equity partner profits. Clifford Chance has changed its governance structure allowing it to do the same thing. A major report from Hildebrandt and Citibank warned that more de-equitizations are coming this year because there’s nothing else left for firms to cut. Respected New York IP boutique Darby & Darby disappeared without warning (and, if you believe the accounts at Above The Law, it went out poorly). Corporate law departments are pulling work back in-house, spending less on outside counsel and turning to alternative fee arrangements. Law firms across the United States are cutting back radically on law student and new lawyer hiring (sample stat: median summer offers per firm dropped from 30 in 2008 to 8 in 2010). And looming over everything is the prospect, now little more than a year away in England & Wales, of full-scale non-lawyer equity ownership of law firms.

We can’t blame this on the recession anymore — what we’re seeing is more fundamental than that. The traditional platform for legal service delivery is giving way, overburdened by its own inefficiencies, inflexibility, and market-unfriendliness. In its place is emerging a new platform — the internet. And on that platform is springing up a multitude of new models by which clients can purchase the legal services they want, whether through virtual or distributed law firms with minimal overhead, advanced software for the completion of simple documents or the facilitation of basic transactions, process-savvy lawyers in other countries or quasi-lawyers in our own jurisdictions, and other platforms yet to emerge that we can’t currently envision. The common thread is client customization: the type, quality, and timeliness of service you want at the price you’re prepared to pay. Law firms will emerge and compete on these bases as well, but they’ll be far from the only game in town.

It’s a revolution, and like all revolutions, the benefits will lag behind the costs. It’s going to be messy and even ugly for awhile — platform shifts are neither neat nor bloodless. Think back to the hassles we all went through with Word-to-WordPerfect conversions while the two programs battled it out. Remember the upheaval in the auto industry as electricity began to shove oil off its fuel platform and the damage that caused to gigantic automakers saddled with suddenly unsellable gas-guzzlers. Think of the carnage in the record and newspaper industries as the internet took away their platforms and rewrote the rules of their games. It may take longer, it may not be as brutal, and it may not generate as much attention in the wider world, but the legal services marketplace is starting to go through something very similar. And there will be casualties.

It’s ironic that Seth chose WordPerfect for his lead example — the legal profession was one of the very last professional groups to abandon WP for the now-ubiquitous Word. Many lawyers to this day insist that WordPerfect was the better program, but when the platform changed for good, even lawyers eventually had to switch. The parallels are close enough to be striking and extremely uncomfortable.

When the platform changes, outsiders replace insiders and opportunities abound. Get ready.

The boutique exodus

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Posted in: Big Firms, Solo & Small Firm

I was talking the other day with a partner in a large national firm. For a variety of reasons, including the nature of his practice area, his annual billings have been declining for a couple of years now, and he’s been contacted about it by some of the senior people in the firm. He’s been tempted, from time to time, to respond to their concerns by saying: “Have you ever noticed that every year, you raise my billing rates, and every year, I bill fewer hours?”

That neatly encapsulates what I think is a real and dangerous trend at a lot of the bigger law firms: week by week, rate increase by rate increase, they’re pricing themselves out of the market. The profit imperative is so strong at these firms, and the level of economic sophistication often so low, that rate increases are ordered up regardless of whether the clients want them, can afford them, or are screaming bloody murder about them. To the extent a firm thinks about its clients when raising rates, it often wagers that they have relatively limited options — they need to get the work done and they want it done by lawyers they trust — and that they aren’t prepared to make a radical and onerous move like switching firms (especially since almost all big firms operate the same and bill the same anyway). That gamble has paid off handsomely over the years, and so the firms have had little incentive to change their approach.

What’s happening now, however, is that the clients and their lawyers are teaming up and doing an end run around the firms. There’s been a barrage of reports over the past few months about lawyers abandoning big firms to set up smaller boutique practices, taking clients with them, and thriving in the result. It’s a four-step process: client tells lawyer it can’t afford her rates anymore. Lawyer tells client she doesn’t control her rates and doesn’t want to lose the client. Light bulbs appear simultaneously over their heads. And a few months later, a new small firm is born, with at least one A-list client on its roster. Continue Reading

The lamp and the laser

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Posted in: Big Firms, Marketing, Solo & Small Firm

When you set up a home office, as I’ve recently been doing, you begin to notice lighting in a way you hadn’t before. It quickly becomes apparent that fixed overhead lights and large floor lamps, no matter how bright they might be, don’t illuminate desks and laptops very well. For close-range work, helping you navigate the nooks and crannies of keyboards and file folders, you need more focused lighting — portable, flexible, easily angled, with small super-bright halogen rather than rounded regular bulbs. These light sources are smaller and carry less wattage than the big lights and lamps — but they serve a specific need much better, and many of our illumination needs these days are pretty specific.

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. Continue Reading

Law firms on demand

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Posted in: Big Firms, Clients, Talent

What if you could take a law firm, carve away all the parts of it you don’t like, and keep all the parts you did? What if, from the client perspective, you could get rid of high and rising prices, time-based bills, gratuitous overhead costs and unfamiliarity with your business? What if, from the lawyer perspective, you could do away with brutal billing targets, inflexible work schedules and long commutes into the downtown core? But what if in both cases, you could keep the high quality of talent and the brand-name assurance that comes with a respected legal services provider — what would that be like?

It’s an intriguing question, but not because of whether it would be feasible — it already is. Firms following this model are blossoming across North America and Europe. They offer corporate clients the services of lawyers with pedigreed credentials (large-firm and law-department experience) who will work from the client’s office or from home, for limited periods of time, at much lower rates than traditional law firms charge. The selling point for clients is the services of an excellent lawyer on the client’s terms, at a competitive price that excludes traditional firm overhead costs and revenue expectations; for lawyers, the challenge of high-end work on a short-term, flexible or even itinerant basis.

Maybe the best-known of this new breed of firms is Axiom Legal, which is closing in on the 300-lawyer mark, but there’s a growing collection of similar operations like Virtual Law Partners, FSB Corporate Counsel, Paragon Legal, Cognition LLP, Virtual Law [UK], The Rimon Law Group, and Keystone Law. They’re often called “virtual firms,” but that’s a little confusing, in light of the growing number of small cloud-based law practices. I prefer VLP’s self-description, a “distributed” law firm, or Keystone’s, “dispersed.” Concerns about these firms usually focus on the scope of their expertise, their value for money, and their KM and quality-control systems, all reasonable worries.  There doesn’t seem to be much question, however, that these firms are sustainable and are already legitimate players in the marketplace.

No, what’s really intriguing about these firms is the fact that they developed at all — that the traditional law firm has become sufficiently unpalatable to the people who retain it (and to some of the people who work inside it) that something new and different can flourish. Dispersed law firms directly challenge the traditional law firm model, presenting themselves as at least a complementary service to what traditional firms offer, and at most, a full-fledged alternative provider. These new firms question the fundamental nature of traditional firms, arguing that the physical concentration of legal talent in a high-priced centralized location with a rigid hierarchy and pyramidic revenue structure is outdated and self-serving. Flexible, project-based, techno-savvy, client-focused law firms are the way of the future, they contend: they’re more efficient, more accessible, and more rational. Continue Reading

Hands across the water

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Posted in: Big Firms, Innovation

I don’t normally focus on very large law firms and mergers thereof, but I’ll make an exception for this one. As you might have heard, US-based Hogan & Hartson and UK-based Lovells have apparently reached an agreement to merge their respective firms by May 2010. The combined entity (Hogan Lovells, provisionally) would crack the top ten worldwide in terms of both number of lawyers (circa 2,500) and annual billings (north of $1.9 billion), would have a massive global reach (as many as 40 offices, including substantial presence in China, Hong Kong and Germany), and would represent a rare joining of roughly equal-sized firms that appear compatible in both practice and culture.

I won’t try to improve upon the analyses already provided by Bruce MacEwen, Alex Novarese and Aric Press, among others. But I will provide one quote from each to indicate that this is not your garden-variety merger announcement:

– Bruce: “This is potentially a transaction that will change a conspicuous portion of the BigLaw landscape globally.”

– Alex: This is “the first concrete evidence to back up the claims made for months by managing partners on both sides of the pond that the general mood is warming to transatlantic mergers.”

– Aric: This is “a sign that while the Magic Circle and most financially elite New York firms continue to insist on their independent futures, firms just one step behind can see a future where a combination is greater than the sum of their parts.”

And in its daily e-newsletter, The Lawyer put it this way: “[T]he consensus so far in the market is that this deal could genuinely see the creation of something not seen before. ‘At a stroke you’ll have a firm the size of [Allen & Overy], better quality than DLA Piper, broader in scope than Herbert Smith and far more international than anything in the current UK mid-market,’ is how one London consultant sums up the deal.” The arrival of anything truly new in the legal services marketplace is always noteworthy, but a Hogan/Lovells merger could have significance beyond whether the firm manages to become more than the sum of its parts (which at this point seems fairly likely).

For one thing, this firm could be really transatlantic, in ways previous cross-ocean expansions (cf. Clifford Chance and Rogers & Wells) were not: a mega-firm, created by a merger of equals, with a center of gravity somewhere between the two capitals rather than vying between them (Hogan & Hartson, with a strong government practice, is headquartered in Washington, D.C., such that traditional London-New York rivalries might not kick in.) Back in February, I forecast a true US-UK powerhouse emerging from the recession, although I thought the American entry would hail from the Big Apple, and I didn’t think it would happen quite so soon. If the experts are right, other cross-ocean mergers might follow and a real wave of consolidation could be at hand.

Secondly, it’s instructive to note the innovations that each side is bringing to the table. The Lawyer reported earlier this month that Lovells is preparing to abandon its lockstep partner compensation system in favour of Hogan’s pure merit-based approach. Merit-based compensation has tremendous momentum in large firms right now, and although no one’s denying the challenges of partner compensation facing a potential Hogan Lovells, this suggests that more complex systems for assessing lawyers’ productivity are at hand. At the same time, Lovells was one of the first law firms to publicly acknowledge it was outsourcing legal document review to India, back in December 2007. UK firms are substantially ahead of their US counterparts in offshoring, so the Hogan side of the deal is going to acquire direct experience with this phenomenon. So in at least two ways, this is going to be very much a 21st-century law firm.

But here’s the main reason why I think this deal could be a game-changer: about a year after the expected May 2010 date for the Hogan Lovells merger to be completed, key provisions of the Legal Services Act come into force, and UK law firms will be allowed to accept non-lawyer investment and ownership under Alternative Business Structures (ABS). What if a future Hogan Lovells decided to take advantage of those provisions? It doesn’t figure to be the kind of Magic Circle or white-shoe firm that most agree would disdain the entrepreneurial offerings of the LSA — in fact, it looks exactly like the sort of firm (fresh, ambitious, global, innovative and unencumbered) for which the non-lawyer equity investment provisions were designed. If this new firm — or any other powerhouse resulting from a US-UK merger in the near future — went down that road, extremely interesting things would start to happen.

Hogan Lovells would be both English and American — and not one of the 50 states allows non-lawyer ownership of even a fraction of a law firm. So if this new firm did in fact accept venture capital or investment-fund equity, or float shares on a stock exchange, it likely would be in immediate contravention of the ethics rules in all the states where it carries on business. Hogan & Hartson, by way of example, currently has offices in Maryland, Colorado, Texas, California, Florida, New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, as well as the District of Columbia. The ensuing tangle, it seems to me, would rapidly bring to a head the burgeoning conflict between how UK firms and US firms are structured and governed. In a globalized legal profession, this conflict is inevitable — but this new firm, if it comes into existence and if it acquires an ABS under the Legal Services Act, could actualize that conflict much sooner than we  expect.

So keep a closer eye on this merger than you normally might. It could be just another instance of two large firms becoming an even larger firm, still struggling to make its way in a challenging marketplace. Or it might turn out to be the catalyst for unprecedented change in the profession worldwide.