What do lawyers sell?

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Posted in: Clients, Purpose

The first time I heard Richard Susskind speak was at a Canadian Bar Association conference in Montreal in 2007. That was also the first time I heard one of the best parables about professional services ever told. I’ll try to paraphrase Richard’s delivery from memory:

“Black & Decker, the power tool company, had just hired a new CEO. He walked into his first meeting with his board of directors, held up a power drill, and asked, ‘Is this what we sell?’ The directors looked at each other and looked at the drill and said, ‘Yes, that’s one of ours; that’s what we sell.’ ‘No, it isn’t,’ replied the CEO, and he put down the drill and picked up a board with a hole in it. ‘This is what we sell,’ he said. ‘This is why the customer comes to us. This is what he wants.'”

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That’s a magnificent illustration of the best way, the only correct way, to look at the process of buying and selling anything — that is to say, from the buyer’s perspective. Given the legal profession’s struggles to cope with a newly evolving market — as exemplified by the shocking cuts and wholesale retrenchment of many large law firms recently — it seems like a good time to apply that question to lawyers.

What do lawyers sell? Ask 100 lawyers that question and you’ll get, not 100 different answers, but a very narrow range of familiar answers, repeatedly proffered. “I sell my time,” some lawyers will respond. “I sell my expertise,” others will reply. The MBA types: “I sell solutions.” The ones who’ve been paying attention: “I sell value.” The ones who haven’t been paying attention: “I sell excellence.”

None of these, however, is a good answer, because none of these are things that clients specifically need and that can be identifiably described.

  • Time: No one in history has ever bought or sold one second of time. It’s not a commodity in any sense of the word.
  • Expertise: No client needs legal expertise for its own sake. Specialized knowledge has only applied, not intrinsic, value.
  • Solutions: Getting closer, but this is a buzzword that’s meaningless without context. And not every legal matter is a “problem.”
  • Value: Closer again, but really, “value” isn’t much better than “solution” — it’s another way of saying, “I sell you what you want.” It’s circular.
  • Excellence: Must try harder.

There’s a better answer to that question, I think — one that unites the many incredibly disparate strands of legal services. There’s one response that can legitimately cover all the myriad needs of diverse legal clients — from getting a will made out to clearing up a tax issue, from overseeing a bankruptcy to managing a high-stakes acquisition, from defending an assault charge to gaining a permanent work visa, from enforcing a child support order to appealing the loss of a business licence.

That one answer is this: Lawyers sell peace of mind. This is what clients seek when they turn to a lawyer. This is their “hole in the board.”

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“Peace of mind” is what you get when you find someone with expertise, someone who’s excellent at what they do, someone who comes up with solutions to problems and avenues for opportunities — you find them, and you speak with them, and over the course of time, you come to trust them. You trust that they will help you, that they will use their skills to remove a worry, manage a process, or come up with an answer that has eluded you. That trust delivers peace of mind.

Almost every client, when he first contacts a lawyer, is legitimately anxious about something important. He’s worried, he’s not sleeping well, his emotional well-being is compromised. “Peace of mind” is what that client gets in that blessed moment when he can say to himself, “It’s alright. I’ve talked to a lawyer, and she’s given me options, and she’s working on the matter, and she’ll take care of it. Someone is looking after it, or will help me through it. I can start to relax now.” And he does.

Look at your own client relationships. Think about the most rewarding engagements, the most satisfied clients. Maybe they won their case, maybe not. Maybe the deal closed, maybe not. But in most cases, the clients who speak most highly of their lawyers are the ones to whom the lawyers gave the gift of peace of mind — the trustworthy assurance that someone is sharing their burden and helping get them to a place where the burden will be lifted.

Clients buy peace of mind — that’s what they want when they hire a lawyer. Gear everything about your practice — your first consultation, your personal manner, your client communications, your dependable prices, your transparent activities — towards increasing your trustworthiness and reliability and relieving your client’s worries and burdens. You will be a happy, successful lawyer with happy, satisfied clients.

Available now! My first two published books: Evolutionary Road (e-book published by Attorney At Work) and Content Marketing and Publishing Strategies for Law Firms (co-authored with Steve Matthews, published by The Ark Group). Click the links to learn more and order your copies today.

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.  

Walking away from a losing game

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Posted in: Big Firms, Clients, Law School, Publishing

And suddenly, everyone’s talking about Procurement. Not that long ago, warning lawyers about the rise of the corporate purchasing function was a little like a medieval parent telling their children about the goblin who lived under the floorboards: you’d better behave, or he’ll come and eat you up. Now the goblin is loose: Procurement’s importance in the purchase of outside legal services, which has been slowly and quietly growing over the past few years, is exploding into view.

Silvia Hodges writes at Bloomberg Law about Procurement’s growing role in Legal, at Law Technology News, and Toby Brown at 3 Geeks gives us three separate columns on the intersection of procurement and legal spend and the implications thereof. You should take the time to read all of these entries, but I think the authors’ overall point is that

(a) Procurement is here to stay,
(b) Procurement’s traditional approach to purchasing is a questionable fit with best practices for legal spend, and
(c) the ideal outcome would be for procurement representatives, the in-house department and the outside law firm to work together towards arrangements that try to serve everyone’s interests.

I’m not confident that (c) is a likely outcome, given each party’s dramatically divergent self-interests, but it’s certainly worth a shot.

What interests me more about the rise of Procurement, however, is how it illustrates a broader trend throughout the legal community: our tendency to let third parties set the rules by which we operate. Procurement at least has a good argument for being at the table: it’s an important aspect of the corporate client that pays the bills. But I’m talking more generally about lawyers ceding control over our own business and professional destinies — our ongoing acquiescence to more aggressive players who have set the standards by which we judge ourselves. The two highest-profile examples, interestingly, are magazines.

For lawyers in large US firms, of course, it’s The American Lawyer. I don’t need to tell you that AmLaw is an excellent periodical, among the very best in class. But the AmLaw 100 rankings are a remarkable thing. A magazine chooses a single metric (average profits per partner) by which to assess large law firms and invites those firms to submit annual financial information so that the magazine can judge them on that metric. And the law firms do exactly that. Has that ever struck you, at any point, as, well, a little odd?

The AmLaw 100 (and 200) rankings, and their progeny in other publications, have arguably done a great disservice to law firms’ own sense of identity and success. Average profits per partner is a flawed metric in many ways (not least mathematically — even median PPP would be a more accurate gauge of a firm’s financial situation, since outliers don’t skew the result so much). It’s especially flawed because it regards annual profit for individual owners as a direct proxy for the health, success and prestige of a law firm. Recent history nicely illustrates the problem with that — Dewey & LeBoeuf was profitable and prestigious until shortly before it crashed.

We already know that good law firms provide more than just partner profits. They also deliver enterprise-wide productivity, a satisfying vocation for employees, a positive corporate social footprint, and above all, value for clients specifically and the legal system generally. Those features aren’t as easy to measure as PPP (especially when the firms conveniently supply all the figures), but they’re no less important. The pernicious modern belief that “The purpose of a business is to create wealth for its owners” was never all that accurate even for ordinary businesses. Law firms are not ordinary businesses — they’re fiduciary professional businesses that operate in a very favourably regulated environment, and they require both responsible management and responsible measurement.

You can probably guess, at this point, that I’m no big fan of PPP rankings. But as much as this approach to measuring law firm success alarms me, I’m more alarmed by the degree to which law firms have surrendered to it. Large US law firms routinely make important decisions about partner recruitment, associate development, legal service pricing and a host of other issues based upon whether the outcome will affect their PPP.

The spectre of a precipitous dive down the AmLaw rankings, and the legitimate fear of the subsequent loss of key partners to firms higher up the list, drives any number of short-term tactical moves by law firms. Some of these moves are sensible; many others aren’t. But the point is that we’ve allowed someone else to set the criteria that drive these decisions. We judge our success on their terms, rather than setting our own standards and taking our destiny into our own hands.

Similarly, take a look at law schools and the degree to which they’re beholden to magazine-based rankings. The US News & World Report — a publication I once referred to as the RC Cola of weekly news periodicals — is infamous for the influence it wields over American law schools. A publication — this one without any actual connection to the legal profession — adopts a series of criteria that it considers important and uses those criteria to rank the schools.

These rankings and their criteria subsequently become vitally important to the schools, which start making decisions — about applicant admission, student classification, faculty hiring, even the number of books in their libraries — not on what’s best for the school and its community, but on what will help them move up the rankings. In many cases, as Brian Tamanaha notes, these decisions have driven behaviour that was not only unwise, but also flat-out dishonest.

In-house counsel now face, with Procurement, a similar phenomenon. Just as the AmLaw rankings care about a single metric (partner profit), procurement officials tend to care about a single outcome: lower expenditures. If that becomes the sole focus of in-house law departments, then it will drive very different types of internal behaviour by Legal — some of it good, some of it not; but all of it determined by someone other than the lawyers involved.

I want to emphasize here that Procurement is not a villain, and neither is US News nor The American Lawyer. These are corporate entities making business decisions that happen to involve or affect the legal profession, and they have every right to do so. The problem, from my point of view, is that lawyers and legal enterprises haven’t responded strongly enough to advance our own priorities in turn. We’ve allowed ourselves to be drawn into games in which we didn’t write the rules, in which those rules don’t serve our best interests, and in which other players’ moves dictate our own. Is that really the best we can do? Are we so insecure that we’re content to be the raw material for other people’s platforms?

Maybe so. But I would hate to think that we went down that road on anyone’s terms but our own. If we allow other people’s criteria for success to become our own, and then blame those criteria when we engage in highly questionable behaviour, then we have an existential problem. But we’re powerless only if we decide to be. We can decide for ourselves what behaviour is important to our mission and values. We can assert broader and better criteria for success, and transparently self-publish them. We can make it perfectly clear, both internally and externally, what matters to us, and then let the world judge us on those choices, not on someone else’s.

The only way to win a game in which you’re set up to lose is not to play. The only way to gain control over your own destiny is to ignore anyone outside your core constituencies who asserts otherwise. There are exactly two constituencies that law firms have to please: the clients who buy their work and the lawyers who are paid to produce it. There are exactly two constituencies that law schools have to please: the profession that hires their graduates and the students who pay to graduate.

Law firms’ and law schools’ conversations about strategy and destiny need to start with those constituencies, and they should end there, too. Everything else, no matter how popular or pervasive, is ultimately just a sideshow and a distraction.

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.

 

Time out: Removing time from pricing and compensation

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Posted in: Billing, Clients

In honour of Star Trek‘s 46th anniversary, let’s write a little sci-fi story.

Suppose you woke up one day and found that for some reason — maybe a tear in the fabric of the space-time continuum, who knows — it had become impossible to docket time at your firm anymore. No device for tracking time would function, from the latest time and billing software down to wristwatches or sundials. No invoice could be generated based on hours devoted to the client’s tasks. No salary or bonus could be issued that was based on time spent on a project.

 Simply put, you could no longer price using time or compensate using time.

What would happen? Well, once the panic attacks had subsided and the screaming had died down, you’d still be faced with a real and pressing need to issue bills to clients and to pay your lawyers. You’d have to figure out how much you should charge your clients for the work you’re doing, and you’d have to come up with a way to recognize each lawyer’s contribution (or lack thereof) to the firm’s success.

On the first point, you’d quickly find yourself on the phone to your clients, explaining the situation and asking for an urgent meeting. “Look,” you’d tell your client, “we’re doing X number of things for you right now, and we both know that some of them are critical to your success and some of them are not so much. We would normally bill you by counting how many hours we took to do that work and multiplying that number by our hourly rates. But the equation is broken; time is missing, and rates are useless without time. We need a new system to help determine our fees to you, but we need your input.”

Some of your clients, the good ones, would be sympathetic — who among us hasn’t had a run-in with the space-time continuum? They’d try to help pull together at least a short-term fix. Straightforward or routine work that any firm could do just as well would be covered by a monthly lump sum, while more complex, important or valuable work could be priced within a mutually pre-set range, with the final amount determined by the satisfaction of several previously agreed success indicators. I imagine you’d walk away from these meetings relieved and grateful for the lifeline.

Then you’d turn to the second point, internal compensation. You’d be forced to find new ways of reckoning each lawyer’s contribution to the firm. You’ve always considered a range of factors, of course, but let’s be honest: time-based billings were invariably on top, followed closely by income generated (on an hourly basis) by clients whom the lawyer had brought into the firm. Thanks to the space-time rip, both of these engines would now be seriously damaged or broken altogether.

Without access to time-based anything in assessing internal value, you’d soon find yourself thinking about more than just your lawyers’ direct and indirect “billings.” You’d look more closely at those lawyers who referred business to other partners and practice groups. You’d notice those lawyers who had a knack for answering clients’ calls and calming their worries, keeping those relationships strong. You’d identify those lawyers who both brought in business and kept it coming, those who took the best young lawyers under their wing, those who assumed real responsibility for knowledge management or talent retention or technological capacity. And you’d find yourself both eager and suddenly able to reward these lawyers and their behaviours.

Not only that, but over the course of time, you’d also notice that work patterns within your firm were starting to change. Your people could no longer think in terms of “how long this work will take,” so they’d need to come up with a new approach to their work. Naturally, they’d start trying to get the routine flat-fee work done as quickly and efficiently as possible, maybe through some kind of process or automation, because it’s only worth $X per month and so the sooner it’s done, the better.

They’d also start looking at the success factors — case won, damages limited, deal closed, budget respected, and so on — that drive the pricing of the higher-end project work. Each box they could tick off would become another premium added to the final fee. Time could still affect price as a client success factor — e.g., the work must be performed within three weeks — but in ways that further drive brisk, efficient workflow. Over the course of time, the tempo and rhythm of life at your firm would start to change.

Pretty soon, you’d find that without any way to track their time, your lawyers were focusing more on getting the job done efficiently and effectively, so they could increase their fees and move to the next task. You’d find that what used to be called “non-billable” activities were flourishing, because they could now be rewarded. You’d find clients calling to compliment you on your firm’s new attitude, the “breath of fresh air” you’ve brought to the relationship.

 And when the space-time rip was eventually fixed, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone clamouring for a return to the old system.

This is my long-winded way of making a point: time is a factor in law firm pricing and lawyer compensation only because we choose to make it so. In most law firms, pricing is cost-plus, and cost is heavily time-based: the firm estimates how many hours from how many lawyers will be required to do the job, checks those lawyers’ rates, does the math, and puts a dollar sign in front of the result.

Remove or amend these two drivers — take time out of pricing, take time out of cost — and you have a legitimately new and potentially game-changing way of doing business.

[Note: This post was inspired by a conversation at ILTA last month among Toby Brown, Ron Friedmann, Susan Hackett, Doug Stansfield and me. Toby and I agreed to write about our respective views on the subject in point-counterpoint blog post fashion. Check out Toby’s post “Logic and the Value of Time” at 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, and please feel free join in with your own post on the subject!]

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.

Losing the confidence game

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Posted in: Clients, Competition

Here are six observations about the legal marketplace for you to consider, each supported by a news report filed just in the last few days.

1. Fewer people want to be lawyers.

Number of law school applicants continues to slide: “[US law school] applications submitted are down 13.6%…. That translates to about 66,696 applicants and about 484,576 applications…. Over the past two years, there’s been a 24.1% decrease in the number of law school applicants and a 19.6% decrease in the number of law school applications submitted… [T]he legal market … is expected to have difficulty absorbing the 45,000 students preparing to graduate law school in each of the next three years.”

2. Fewer new lawyers are finding legal jobs.

Two law graduates for every lawyer: “The [US] Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS] estimates that 212,000 jobs will become available for [US] attorneys over the course of this decade, mostly as a result of replacement rather than growth. If the number and size of ABA-accredited law schools remains the same, that means 48% of law graduates this decade can be expected to get (not keep, get) a legal job.

3. More clients are using lawyer substitutes.

The low-cost lawyer is not a lawyer: “The financial constraints of the last few years have forced companies and law firms to consider whether every legal problem must be staffed with attorneys who, thanks to the high costs of their education, demand higher salaries.  If BLS’ projections bear out, it appears that clients and firms may have found permanent low-cost substitutes for many legal jobs in the form of paralegals, legal assistants and even accountants.”

4. Lawyers’ monopoly over legal services is dissolving.

Co-Operative Legal Services granted license to practice law: “In the past six years, [the Co-Op] has built a £25m-plus, 500-person legal business without needing to be an ABS, but the licence opens up more opportunities.They include launching a fixed-fee family law service later this year, handling legal aid work, and offering face-to-face legal advice through the Co-op’s bank network.”

5. Clients have access to lawyer-like technology.

Disruptive technology in the hands of clients: “The Association of Corporate Counsel today launched ACC Contract Advisor, a contract-drafting tool built on what is described as a “vast collection” of sample contracts and thousands of real-world clauses. Launched in collaboration with kiiac.com, the new resource is, unfortunately, available only to ACC members. … A user can search all documents for specific language. Model contracts and clauses can be downloaded.”

6. More disputes are being resolved without lawyers.

Coming soon: a global ODR system: “Businesses that have a really well-developed resolution system make a lot more money. Customers trust them,” added Rule, former director of online dispute resolution for eBay Inc., and PayPal, which collectively uses ODR to resolve 60 million disputes a year. … “We built a civil justice system. We built a walled garden. Now the challenge is more and more transactions are happening outside the walled garden.”

You could draw any number of conclusions from these six data points. But my strong impression is that we’re experiencing a switch in the legal market’s default setting.

Watching the legal profession today is like seeing a champion golfer, previously considered invulnerable, struggling with his game for so long that at a key moment, his opponents experience a sudden switch from feeling intimidated to feeling empowered. It’s like seeing a global business smartphone giant, whose products were once ubiquitous, suffering so many consecutive reversals of fortune that at a key moment, the market decides that the company’s products are no longer the default standard and switches en masse. It’s like seeing a national leader, in power for so long that everyone accepts his rule as a fait accompli, make enough bad decisions that the streets are filled with opponents who suddenly believe today, as they haven’t for many yesterdays, that change can happen.

The aura of incumbency is far more powerful than we realize. Politicians who “can’t” lose, products that “can’t” be outsold, majority opinions that “can’t” be swayed — in these and similar situations, the “can’t” is most often rooted in the challenger’s state of mind. The simple act of observing those who occupy positions of power leads us to credit them with more merit than they probably deserve. The incumbents, in turn, sense and absorb this impression, making them feel and appear even stronger, while also making them more complacent.

But when the aura of incumbency flickers or fades — when, for a variety of reasons, the “natural” leader suffers a series of setbacks and loses momentum — then a switch invariably occurs, first in people’s minds and then in the market. That’s where the legal profession is, right now.

We’ve held down the primary (if not the exclusive) position in the legal market for so long that everyone — ourselves included — came to believe that this was the natural order of things. Then things changed, as things tend to do. We’ve found ourselves losing much of our momentum and with it, much of our confidence. The aura of our incumbency has slipped. Everyone sees it, and everyone feels the change. And suddenly, we’re foundering.

Can we regain that momentum, restore our aura? I’m not sure. Confidence is a scarce resource in a marketplace: rarely do both the challengers and the champions possess it. Right now, the momentum belongs to the challengers, who see an opening they’re never seen before and had perhaps believed they never would. Lawyers are vulnerable, both in mood and in market reality, to a degree that I think we’ve never experienced. We need to find our confidence and re-establish ourselves as the favourites — but confidence, like liquidity in a financial crisis, is always available except when you really need it.

We’ve entered a crucial period in the evolution of the legal market, one that could usher in a paradigm change, a platform shift, a change on the leaderboard. Are we up to the challenge? The answer to that question contains the future of our profession.

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.

Pricing to the client experience

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Posted in: Billing, Clients, Marketing

Many lawyers, gnawed by doubt, regularly ask themselves, “What should I charge?” It’s the question with a million right answers — which is to say, with no right answer at all. Whatever number you finally settle on, however, is less important than the process by which you arrived at it. As far as I can tell, lawyers’ most common methods of determining price are:

  1. Find out what comparable lawyers are charging and, depending on your self-confidence, charge more, less or about the same as them.
  2. Calculate your internal costs of doing business, tack on a percentage equal to your desired profit margin, and charge that.
  3. Keep quoting slightly higher prices for successive clients until one of them winces or balks, then hang out at that price for a while.

Each of these approaches has its merits, I suppose. But you’ll probably notice that each has one thing in common: the client is not asked to participate. Lawyers have rarely if ever invited the client into the pricing process, mostly because they assume the client will do everything in its power to drive the final price down. That’s not an unreasonable assumption, on the face of it, but it means that the lawyer is left groping alone in the dark for a number in which the client has an equal interest.

An emerging line of thought in alternative (non-hourly) pricing, one with which I’m in strong agreement, asserts that the client is in fact indispensable to the pricing process. “Pricing your product is actually simple, as long as you consider it from the buyer’s point of view,” says Seth Godin, who knows more about pricing than most people. “The real trick is gaining an understanding of what [clients] actually do and do not value in a given piece of legal work. … [and t]he only effective way to understand a client’s value priorities is to have a direct conversation with them,” says Toby Brown, who knows more about pricing than anyone else in the legal market.

Now, I’m certainly not saying that you let the client determine what the price is going to be. I’ve said elsewhere that it’s the seller’s job to take responsibility for price, Toby emphasizes that the client’s value proposition must be reconciled with the lawyer’s, and Danny Ertel adds for good measure how critical it is that the lawyer learn what line of reasoning led the client to its own price estimate. Pricing is a two-way street. More to the point, it’s a conversation — not a monologue or a directive or a statement of fact by the lawyer. You cannot have a grown-up conversation about pricing without the client.

I want to take this line of thought another step further. I want to suggest that not only does client participation make pricing easier and more satisfying, but that clients themselves can actually be the basis of your pricing. Matt Homann points us to a great article called “Pricing strategies for creatives” (a category that I think includes lawyers), which included this powerful excerpt:

It’s a little-known secret that you can charge not only for your creative work, but also for the client experience around the work you deliver. In essence, you can price things that have nothing to do with design, but have everything to do with the experience your client encountered throughout the process of engaging with you on their project.

I think this is completely applicable to the legal profession. So many lawyers (as so many clients will ruefully attest) can barely bring themselves to notice how clients experience the legal process. We pay close attention to the nature and quality of the legal work we do, but we pay relatively little attention to how we deliver that work, how our services are received, and how the client feels about it. A small minority of lawyers and law firms, for reasons of personality or branding or both, do pay attention to the “how” of legal services, and they reap the benefit of happier clients (and often, happier lawyers). But I’m not aware of any firm that has explicitly said, “The client experience will be a key component of our pricing strategy.”

Think of it this way. One law firm might say, “We have the very best lawyers in the city, and we charge a premium for that unique characteristic.” Another firm might say, “We are the biggest firm in the country, and we charge a premium for that unique characteristic.” What if your firm said, “We make the client the center and purpose of everything we do here — and we charge a premium for that unique characteristic.” The nature and value of how your client receives your services can be the basis of your pricing, so long as hardly anyone else makes that their unique competitive foundation — and that, in the legal profession, is not a concern that should keep you up at night.

Law, as usual, lags behind other sectors in this regard. In any other service business, how you are served is a differentiator, if not a full-scale driver, of pricing. If you don’t believe this, think back to the last time you tipped more (or less) than 15% at a restaurant, and ask yourself why. I can almost guarantee that it had nothing to do with the food or the decor; the menu already priced those out for you. The tip is what you pay for service. And what you tipped your server had everything to do with whether or not you received service that was cheerful, responsive, quick, inquisitive, memorable, and genuinely focused on your enjoyment of the experience — or that was the opposite. That’s what you pay for when you’re buying services. Why would your own clients be any different?

If the way you treat your clients is cheerful, responsive, quick, inquisitive, memorable, and genuinely focused on their interests, you can charge for that. In the legal marketplace, in fact, it’s such a huge differentiator that you can probably charge a lot for it. You can charge for hiring people obsessed with client satisfaction. You can charge for returning calls within 24 hours. You can charge for giving clients 24/7 access to their files and billing status. You can charge for entering your clients’ birthdays into your CRM system and sending them a card on the big day. You can charge for asking, “Is there anything else, anything at all, that we can help you with today?” For crying out loud, you can even charge for not charging by the hour! These are real client benefits. They make clients’ lives easier or happier. And most lawyers don’t offer them.

Are all these things entered as separate line-item charges in the bill? Of course not! But they’re part of the service experience at your firm. They’re what make you special — because they make your clients feel special. And that is not a commodity. That is not subject to the vagaries of the market. The price of almost every lawyer product — the deliverable or outcome at the end of the lawyer’s efforts — will decrease over the coming decade. But the price of a lawyer’s service — the personal, customized, convenient, anticipatory, strategic, counseling, caring way in which the client is treated and their interests looked after — will hold steady and will very probably rise.

There is always going to be exquisitely challenging or important legal work for which clients will pay virtually any amount billed in any format, even if delivered with an impersonal touch bordering on disdain. But most legal work is not in that category, an emerging fact that’s cutting the legs out from under the standard billable rates that many lawyers and law firms have traditionally commanded. We need a new basis for asserting our value and differentiating ourselves from each other. We’re all smart and knowledgeable and hard-working. But we’re not all great at service. We don’t all care the same about our clients. We don’t all engineer our billing methods and matter management and client communication so as to maximize the client experience.

Markets reward scarcity. Great client experience in the legal market is scarce. It’s time to think about client-experience pricing.

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.

The imaginary normal

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Posted in: Clients

The joke goes like this: “The optimist says the glass is half-full. The pessimist says it’s half-empty. The engineer says it’s twice the required capacity.”

So what does the lawyer say when looking at the glass? In many cases, it’s: “Why hasn’t anyone refilled my drink yet?”

I speak to more lawyers and legal professionals every day who really get it — who understand how much is changing and who are preparing to adjust and respond. I can’t tell you how encouraging that is to me.

But I’m still taken aback by the number of lawyers and legal professionals who cannot or will not recognize what’s happening — who look at the market and see only what they want to see, interpreting a storm of the century as merely a passing squall.

For many such lawyers, I’ve come to conclude, the underlying cause of that delusion is a sense of entitlement. They’re entitled to respect for their position, steady work from clients, protection from unqualified competition, privilege at the top of the pyramid, stability in an unstable world.

And why should they think different? It’s all they’ve ever known and it’s rewarded them handsomely, so of course they believe it’s the natural order of things. They believe it’s normal, and they’re waiting impatiently for it to return.

Here’s what I want them to understand: It’s not normal. It never was.

The legal market hasn’t really been a “market,” in classical terms, at all. It’s been artificially constrained for decades by asymmetric knowledge, inadequate technology, limited competition, undifferentiated providers, seller-driven pricing, and most damaging of all, the absence of disinterested regulators. Accordingly, buyers have long suffered from weak bargaining positions and low self-confidence. Why, when you stop and think about it, would we ever have supposed that was normal?

The legal profession has been living inside a bubble for decades. And like all bubbles, those on the inside thrived disproportionate to the overall benefits they were delivering, while resentment and frustration continually grew on the outside. And we had no clue, because we figured that was how it was meant to be.

But now that’s changing. Consumers are gaining more knowledge and more choice, giving them more power. The bubble is leaking. The traditional mechanics of healthy markets, by which sellers truly compete with each other to gain the business of well-informed buyers on the buyers’ terms, are reasserting themselves. A legal marketplace that has always been tilted in lawyers’ favour is rebalancing itself.

This isn’t a market going crazy. It’s a market going normal. And it’s not going back.

Goodbye to all that

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Posted in: Big Firms, Clients, Innovation, Technology

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.

  • They promise legal documents not just faster and cheaper but also, incredibly, better, in terms of quality and reliability.
  • They promise greater efficiency and transparency in the previously laborious RFP-driven process of choosing and pricing law firms.
  • They promise real-time integration of world-class legal knowledge into the legal work production process.
  • They promise alignment of a legal task’s value with its performer’s skills, qualification and location.
  • And at ILTA, they demonstrated delivery on all these promises and more.

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.

 

Losing the quality wars

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Posted in: Clients

There are days when I feel optimistic that lawyers can rise to the challenges before us and take the lead in the new legal marketplace now emerging worldwide. And then there are days like today.

Three data points for you. The first from a friend who sent along this item from the 2010 ACC/Serengeti Managing Outside Counsel Survey:

Slightly more than 40% of in-house counsel believe that the value of the work performed by at least some of their outside counsel declined during 2010. About 55% of in-house counsel provided some specific suggestions to their outside lawyers as to how the quality of services could be improved.

The second, from an outstanding article by USC Law School’s Gillian Hadfield:

Surprisingly, the complaints I hear focus far more on the value of legal work than on the cost. This focus is surprising because during the last decade or so, the cost of legal services and procedures has soared. One recent industry survey concluded that law firm prices had increased 75 percent since 2000, far outstripping a 20 percent growth in non-law firm costs. … But the cost problem only sharpens the sting of complaints about value: Clients feel that they are paying more and more for legal work that helps them out less and less.

The third, from a LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell survey (as reported by the AmLaw Daily) about law firm “efforts” to solicit and implement feedback from clients:

More than 70 percent of law firms responded that client feedback affects the way their lawyers conduct business … yet fewer than half (48 percent) formally solicit client critiques and just one-third communicate the feedback to lawyers. … Corporate counsel report that one of their biggest frustrations is giving feedback that is neither properly fed back to relevant parties in the firm, nor acted upon. … 56 percent of firms reported that their lawyers were either “ambivalent” or “not enthusiastic” about any attempts to actively communicate with clients.

Folks, it’s one thing to be defeated by superior forces with a better product or service. It’s another to lose before we begin because we couldn’t even be bothered to show up for the fight.

It should be clear enough by now that client work is segmenting into a small number of mission-critical matters and growing piles of ordinary and commoditized tasks. It also should be clear that highly efficient and systematic competitors from outside the profession have targeted those piles and are on a mission to own them. We are getting beaten up on both price and convenience because we don’t take either of these pillars of business success seriously. None of this, unfortunately, is new to lawyers.

But the one thing we could always fall back on, the foundation stone of our professional edifice, is that we deliver high-quality legal work when it counts. Competitors without our training, expertise and ethics might take away all that basic low-margin commodity work, what with their relentless focus on efficiency and customer service. But no computer, no paralegal, no foreign attorney will ever be able to replace the high-quality legal solutions we deliver to our clients. That belief lies at the heart of what I can only call our continued widespread complacency in the face of extraordinary market change.

And that’s fine. But if high-quality legal solutions are the foundation of our offering, then the three points listed above should strike fear. Because if we lose our clients on quality — if clients come to perceive, and a disturbing number already do, that the quality of lawyers’ services is declining and that we don’t seem to care — then we are in serious danger. Clients will always pay us whatever we charge for one thing: high-quality services that deliver verifiably high value. If that foundation crumbles — if our quality suffers and our value, already questionable, declines further — what do we think is going to happen next?

I want to see the legal profession win the coming battles for the lion’s share of the legal marketplace. But if it’s not asking too much, could we at least arrive at the battlefield on time and give it our best shot?

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.

The stratified legal market and its implications

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Posted in: Big Firms, Clients, Innovation

An extraordinary conversation has emerged among multiple authors in the blawgosphere over the past few days. It revolves around a pressing question: in light of the huge changes in the marketplace, what will become of law firms? More specifically, given the increasing segmentation and stratification of the universe of legal work, how can law firms — traditional, inflexible, one-size-fits-all businesses that they are — respond to these changes and continue to thrive? Can law firms serve multiple segments of a newly diverse market simultaneously, and if so, how?

No fewer than seven articles by six writers have explored this subject so far, and I recommend you take 10-15 minutes and go read these pieces (if you haven’t already) before continuing:

Collectively, these posts represent a deep dive into a subject that should command the attention of law firm leaders in firms of every size, because they identify a fundamental challenge. The nature of legal work is changing, and when demand changes, markets require suppliers to change as well. Law firms must adapt to at least some degree; but how, and in what ways? Inspired by all these posts, here’s my assessment of where we find ourselves right now and whether and to what degree law firms can move forward from here.

When viewed from the perspective of clients (which, when you think about it, is the perspective that counts), there are three types of outsourced legal work (that is, work not performed in-house). This is roughly how clients would describe them:

1. Mission-critical.

This requires a lawyer.
It really matters who we use.
It doesn’t matter how much it costs.

“This is mission-critical stuff; if this doesn’t work out, the company takes a major hit and my job could be on the line. Conversely, though, if it works out, the company avoids a hit and/or makes a huge gain, and my star rises considerably. There’s no way we can pull this off ourselves — it’s too big. So we need to hire the best — that is, either the very best lawyers to get it done right, or the firm with the best reputation so that if it goes wrong, I can point to the firm’s rep and say, look, I chose the cream of the crop, so don’t blame me. I’ll pay whatever lawyers or firms like that cost.”

2. Ordinary course of business

This requires a lawyer.
It doesn’t matter who we use.
It matters how much it costs.

“This needs to get done, and it’s definitely lawyer work, and we don’t have the manpower in-house to do it. But it’s also the kind of thing that comes up pretty frequently in our business. And of course we want it done well, but a loss or a failure wouldn’t be fatal. ‘Good enough” is good enough here. Many lawyers and a lot of firms do this kind of work, so we’ll be well served no matter who we choose. But with the budget pressures I’m under, I’m going to make sure that whoever we hire has a good system in place for doing this work and bills below the median rate. I can afford to set some conditions.”

3. Commodity

This doesn’t require a lawyer.
It doesn’t matter who we use.
It really, really matters how much it costs.

“This needs to get done, but this is basic stuff and it’s the sort of thing that comes up over and over again. I’ll find a cost-effective outside solution that can process these matters rapidly, repeatedly and reliably: a professional staffing firm like Axiom, a freelance contract lawyer, or maybe an LPO. Unless we’re really lucky and can find a law firm to do it as well and as cheaply as these other suppliers (which I seriously doubt), I can’t justify asking a typical firm to do this — even their discounted rates are more than this is worth.”

(This division is inspired in no small part by John’s rate pyramid. It also helps to think of these three types of work as occupying, in declining order, the five stages of legal matters proposed by Richard Susskind: bespoke, standardized, systemized, packaged, and commoditized.)

Law firms have long supplied all three types of work to clients, invariably by way of the cost-plus billable-hour system. Clients, lacking both other options and the incentive to go look for any, went along. One market, one model. But now there are three markets: mission-critical, ordinary-course-of-business, and commodity. The universe of legal work has segmented and stratified. (One can argue that it was always segmented and stratified, but that the market mechanisms to recognize and process this segmentation didn’t exist till now, which I think is fair.)

The question before us is whether one law firm can still supply all three types of work, or even two of the three. More specifically: is it possible for a firm to do so, and then, is it feasible?

1. Is it possible? Yes, as my friends make clear in their blog posts. Ron and Toby point out that the hotel and banking industries feature companies that successfully serve different market needs through different brands. In a similar vein, Steve points to Toyota, a company that profitably produces both the Lexus and the Yaris. To those three examples, I’d add a fourth: shoe stores. Many people don’t realize that the five or six different shoe stores in your average shopping mall, each geared towards a different market segment, are often owned by the same company. Theoretically, there’s nothing preventing law firms from taking the same approach, adapting their offerings to the demands of each market segment.

2. Is it feasible? Here’s where it gets tricky. In practical terms, how would a law firm go about offering both mission-critical and ordinary-course-of-business services simultaneously, within the same enterprise? This raises problems that, on the whole, I see as insurmountable.

  • The structures for each tier (let alone for the commodity work) are very different and would require, at a minimum, separate facilities in different locations: Hilton doesn’t house Astorias and Hampton Inns in the same complex.
  • They would have to operate under different brand names: Cravath can’t start up an employment-law subsidiary under its high-end corporate name, for the same reason that Florsheim doesn’t sell basketball sneakers: the brand dilution is too strong.
  • And as Mary points out, support systems and infrastructure will differ too. Will one part of a law firm will suffer systematization and efficiency measures when other parts of the firm continue to happily bill by the hour? And could that even be managed financially?

But I think there’s a more fundamental challenge, which Mary also raises: “How do you handle the potential for income disparity and differing levels of respect for the lawyers in each practice?” To an extent, this is a problem in current full-service law firms, where some partners earn ten times or more what others make. But in an explicitly two- or three-tiered law firm, it would become intolerable, because there would be clear divisions in quality of work, level of pay, and inevitably, quality of lawyer, and that simply will not be borne.

Every lawyer considers himself or herself to be an exceptional talent, and if there are some within the firm who make more money, well, that can be an accident of economics, and if there are some who are clearly incredibly gifted, well, we all like to have a few superstars on board; but let’s be perfectly clear, we’re all excellent around here — we’re only talking about degrees of excellence. This is the fiction that all lawyers in a firm tell themselves, even when the hard truth is that, as Mark puts it, most lawyers are mediocre (I’d use the more charitable term “ordinary”). The politeness of collegiality (which some partners lack the manners to maintain) asserts this fiction of excellence because it makes everyone feel better about themselves and improves morale and unity of purpose. But a firm that publicly announces, “We have one set of lawyers for extraordinary work and another set for the basic day-to-day stuff,” abandons this fiction and  suffers the consequences. Firms hide this division today under the “full-service” label, but it exists and everyone knows it; keeping it hidden and unspoken is one of the things holding many law firms together.

At a certain point, the multiple divisions within a tiered firm would diverge so widely that they would  effectively become separate firms, bringing into question the point of the whole exercise. Could a law firm create a holding company to manage a fleet of separate legal enterprises? Within the right legislative environment, sure — but why would it want to? How could it be worth the hassle? It’s hard enough to manage a single law firm, and as Ron suggests, lawyers don’t possess a ton of management acumen or entrepreneurial spirit. Berwin Leighton Paisner’s Lawyers On Demand service, which Ron references, may be the only really successful example I’ve seen of a law firm operating two legal business models simultaneously — and even that service, which explicitly offers different types of lawyers serving different types of client needs, looks like it might be spun off into a separate entity.

For these reasons, I think it’s next to impossible, in practical terms, for a law firm to explicitly serve both the mission-critical market and the ordinary-course-of-business market: the requirements are too different and the cultural pressures too intense. A firm can position itself to offer ordinary-course-of-business services — Mark cites the example of a “big-firm quality at small-firm prices” brand that presents a sensible-yet-still-professional image to the market and allows everyone to save face. But that image can’t co-exist, within the same enterprise, with a “We’re the very best in the world and you’ll never get fired for hiring us” brand. Very few lawyers beyond their third year of call will voluntarily wear the “second-class status” discount tag with a smile.

So how will this dilemma be resolved? Legal work is segmenting and stratifying, and law firms can no longer profitably perform this work in a one-size-fits-all business model: mid-level work requires a degree of management and systematization, while the truly commoditized work requires full-scale business process re-engineering. But it seems to me that trying to operate two or three different business models under the same roof, name or brand will generate centrifugal forces too powerful to contain. How does this story end?

I think, inevitably, it ends with the breakdown of many of today’s large, full-service firms into smaller enterprises that serve these component markets:

Mission-critical work will go to a small cadre of firms with outstanding lawyers and outstanding reputations: they might be global, but they won’t be as massive as they are today, because they will require fewer lawyers on-site to carry out their work and will instead make use of the “commodity”-type enterprises described in #3 above to carry out the more routine work that associates and junior partners used to do. These mission-critical firms will retain the powerful names and brands that their best lawyers helped forge over the years. They will charge stunningly high rates and will likely operate much the same as today’s law firms do.

Ordinary-course-of-business work will be the province of large firms that have evolved the types of systems, procedures and philosophies that reflect the “Law Factories” Ron writes about. They will routinely make use of legal project management, automated document assembly, dynamic knowledge management, online service delivery and other innovations that reduce the cost and increase the efficiency of legal service delivery. Will they do good work? Of course! Competence is not an issue within any of these tiers. But the work will be less valuable to clients and will be priced more competitively, necessitating a frugal-innovation approach. These firms might very well employ lockstep partner compensation, since the corner-office gorillas will have decamped to the mission-critical providers. Some of these firms will be direct descendants of today’s big firms, with the same names and addresses; but many more will be entirely new creations, formed from the splintered remains of today’s big firms that found themselves caught in the no-man’s land between the high-end critical and low-end commodity markets.

Commodity work will, for the most part, have left the legal profession behind. It will belong to enterprises that resemble informatics providers more than law offices. Indeed, leading the pack will be companies like Thomson and its Pangea3 division, along with other financial, data and information companies like Bloomberg and LexisNexis (and maybe Google?). Legal process outsourcing companies will be players, some of them riding a wave of venture investment made possible by the Legal Services Act and its North American progeny. At the consumer end, look for outfits like Wal-Mart or CitiBank to offer as many basic legal services as regulations will allow. This is the work that has, in Steve’s words, risen up “through the floorboards” and is now, as Toby suggests with banks and check-cashing services, no longer lucrative enough to warrant lawyers’ efforts.

That, to my mind, is the near-term future of the legal marketplace: a wide-scale disaggregation of full-service law firms into smaller enterprises adapted to meet stratified market segments. If you think that sounds like a chaotic, messy and deeply upsetting experience for the legal profession, then I think you’re right. Law firms are complex business models of the kind Clay Shirky warns about, and when these models pass the point of maximum complexity, they don’t gradually disassemble themselves in an orderly manner: they simplify, quickly and radically. I don’t hope for that outcome. But it’s difficult to see another likely way for this to end.

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.

The new price wars

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Posted in: Billing, Clients, Innovation

Their World Series victory last fall wasn’t the only surprise the San Francisco Giants sprang on the baseball establishment. Throughout the 2010 season, the team engaged in “dynamic pricing,” changing the price of single-game tickets according to demand. The same seat for a Monday night yawnfest in May against the Washington Nationals, for example, would be priced well below a Friday night game down the stretch in September with the L.A. Dodgers. The new system, which reflects the ancient marketplace rule that demand drives price, produced a 6% revenue increase throughout the season and is expected to spread throughout not just MLB, but also the NBA and NHL in short order.

The Giants’ approach will sound familiar to anyone who grew up, as I did, in the era of “cheap night” at the movies, wherein ticket prices for Tuesday night showings were less than half those of other nights. The theaters, normally all but deserted on Tuesdays, were instead always full. Given that cinema owners make most of their money off concession sales, I imagine that “cheap Tuesdays” were immensely profitable. But as Malcolm Gladwell observed in The Tipping Point, theaters could actually go farther and change the price of individual movies according to their popularity, much as the Giants are doing with their game tickets: charge more for The King’s Speech and less (much less) for Yogi Bear.

There’s a reason why price tags are printed on cheap stickers, easily applied and frequently changed. Price is not carved in stone; it’s elastic, a function of supply and demand. This is true even in the law: it’s the rare lawyer who has never offered a discount on his or her hourly rate to win a client engagement. But rate discounts are about as radical as law firms have ever gotten with price. For most lawyers, fixing a price in advance of providing the service is anathema, and adjusting that fixed price according to a set of evolving criteria is farther beyond the pale again. But I think that’s about to change.

What got me thinking in this direction were reports this week that henceforth, DLA Piper (the newest holder of the “world’s biggest firm” title) was instituting minimum purchase levels for its clients. DLA’s US offices are said to be mandating an entry-level threshold of $200,000 a year for all new clients, while DLA International will set the amounts at €25,000 for new clients that don’t pose a potential conflict and €100,000 for those that do. The reasons, as explained in an excellent post by Financial Times GC Tim Bratton, are interesting: the firm wants lawyers to consider the firm’s strategic priorities more than their own; it wants to reduce the size of “conflict shadows” cast by smaller clients; and it wants to reduce the administrative cost of dealing with so many matters. Essentially, the firm wants many fewer, and much bigger, clients.

Some of my friends in the blawgosphere have called this a “cover charge,” but I don’t think that’s exactly the right analogy. A cover charge is an amount everyone pays at the entrance to ensure that no matter how little you spend upon entering, the proprietor will still turn a profit. DLA Piper, by contrast, is hiring a large, heavily muscled man to stand at the front door and admit only those customers who are guaranteed to spend enough to produce a profit. They’re pre-screening their clients for wealth, much as a legal aid clinic pre-screens its clients for poverty.

It might not win any points for populism, and there are serious implications for current and future partners. But as a strategic execution, as a profitability measure, and as a clear marketplace signal about which clients it desires, it’s brilliant: as Ron Friedmann notes, “it’s about making a conscious decision about your business, your costs, and your market position,” something few firms do. And in its own way, it’s an example of pricing innovation that other firms should follow.

I’ve written before about how the maxim “Don’t compete on price” has limited value in a highly competitive, price-sensitive market. Law didn’t use to be one of those markets; it is now, and some degree of price competition is becoming inevitable. But “competing on price” doesn’t have to mean getting involved in a downward-spiraling price war. As DLA Piper has demonstrated, you can compete on price upwards, setting floors rather than ceilings on how much you charge. For that matter, you can compete on price sideways, diagonally, and inside out through the fourth dimension if you like. You can make price a market differentiator simply by being creative and gutsy.

Examples are already abounding. Carolyn Elefant suggests that DLA Piper might effectively “offer $300,000 worth of service to clients who are willing to lock in and pre-pay the $200,000 minimum. Between the cash-flow benefit of receiving $200,000 up front and use of offshoring or second-tier contract lawyers in house, DLA Piper could still earn a decent profit, even while providing a ‘volume discount.” John Wallbillich at The Wired GC goes further: “What about a firm that does $1 million plus for a client not charging for telephone consultations with a defined number of client in-house counsel? Or provide access to part of a firm’s form files or knowledge management repository? How about a 3+ year associate on-site, gratis, for clients spending more than $5 million?”

Here are some more possibilities that law firms should mull over.

1. Charge like an airline. Some client matters are utterly routine, some are high priority, and some are absolutely urgent; but most lawyers tend to price solutions to each type of matter the same. Airlines thrive, even in a cutthroat marketplace, by charging you more for a ticket tomorrow than for one in three weeks’ time. What’s to stop a law firm from saying to client with an urgent problem: “To get this done tomorrow, we’ll need to drop everything else we’re doing and work on it for the next 24 hours; that’s a lost opportunity cost for us that will be reflected in a higher price.” Or conversely: “This is a low priority for you and can be done at a fairly leisurely pace by us; we’ll chop 30% off our regular price to reflect those facts.” Clients might not like the former treatment, but they’d understand it and probably accept it; they would love, and remember, the latter treatment.

2. Charge like a cellphone company. A dangerous comparison, to be sure, since many cellphone contracts epitomize the concept of gouging. But I mean this in the sense that many companies will discount the price of a cellphone itself, all the way up to 100%, if you subscribe to the connection service and payment plan. What would a law firm give a client for free in return for the guarantee of a fixed (and pre-paid) monthly fee over a two-year period? Maybe ten hours a month of a designated senior associate or junior partner’s time, no bills, no disbursements; maybe access to multi-jurisdictional regulatory compliance status updates; maybe an emergency “hot line” number that would put the client directly in touch with a responsible firm representative 24 hours a day. It would essentially be the freemium model applied to law.

3. Charge like a partner in a relationship. Seth Godin points out the cognitive dissonance by which many companies give their best rates to their worst customers: the difficult, the demanding, the frequent switchers. Similarly, their most loyal and enthusiastic customers are taken for granted and are charged accordingly. My Edge colleague Ed Wesemann has noted the same problem in law firms: discounts are offered to entice new business, but if the one-time client comes aboard and stays aboard, its rates soon go up and it’s relegated to the same “standard” treatment as the firm’s other “best” clients. Reward your best clients, give them discounts and freebies without being asked, simply to say thank you for being your relationship partner. As Seth puts it: make your best customers into your best marketers.

Lawyers resist change in many aspects of their work, but most of all in pricing: they try to pass all the risk of price miscalculation onto the client, a goal that the billable-hour system fulfills perfectly. Mature markets, however, allow (if not demand) more sophisticated pricing in which both the buyer and the seller accept some risk as a justifiable sacrifice to the greater goal of a stable, mutually beneficial relationship. DLA Piper is taking a risk with this new client minimum scheme, because it has both upside and downside: good for them, no matter how it works out.

Price is a conversation, not a command; it’s a journey rather than a destination. Lawyers with the wisdom to recognize that, and the courage to be flexible and creative in response, will emerge the winners from the new price wars that look poised to begin.