The intangible law firm

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Posted in: Marketing, Process, Technology

Remember all those ludicrous predictions you kept hearing about how law firms were someday going to invest heavily in intelligent technology that could do legal work? Funny thing about that: someday is today.

Here’s what’s actually happening, right now, with advanced technology in law firms:

This is only a recent sample of law firms’ technological commitments: consider Ron Friedmann’s Online Legal Services list for a more complete picture. And it’s not just happening in the US, either.

  • Berwin Leighton Paisner is using “AI-type solutions to carry out standard legal processes hundreds of times faster than traditional methods that use painstaking human labour.”
  • Mishcon de Reya’s new ten-year strategy includes a plan to “drive the automation of everything that can be automated, whether it’s legal or process,” including the establishment of  “an internal laboratory to vet artificial intelligence initiatives in a bid to make the firm an ‘early adopter for new technologies.'”
  • Australia’s Gilbert & Tobin has filed several patent applications to cover new computer applications it has built: “Rather than take 20 hours, some tasks can now be done in two hours,” said a G+T partner.

Talking openly and on the record about eliminating billable hours in a law firm has traditionally been regarded either as heresy or a sign of mental instability. “Burn the witch” would also have been a standard response to a lawyer who advocated spending real money on anything that could be described as artificial intelligence. But the facts are what they are: major law firms are actually building systems to do some tasks that previously only lawyers could do, at the expense of some of the firm’s hourly-billed inventory.

But that’s not all. Law firms are also adapting to the emerging imperative of process improvement, finding ways to introduce efficiencies and enhance the quality of outcomes through better procedures and workflow systems.

  • At Seyfarth Shaw, the process improvement gospel of Seyfarth Lean has become part of the firm’s core culture.
  • Process is just as important as technology for Littler Mendelson programs such as CaseSmart and Compliance HR.
  • Clifford Chance launched its Continuous Improvement program back in 2014 in a search for “the best approach to carrying out a piece of work.”
  • Gowling WLG talks about its acquisition of expertise in “non-legal support components of service delivery” such as project management and pricing.

You can expect to hear more of this from law firms in future. “Something like 90 percent of the RFPs we receive ask us about our [legal project management] capabilities,” said one respondent to a Jomati Consulting survey. “We get RFPs that not only ask us if we do project management, but also our specific methodology, and how many matters we have under administration,” said another. This is not a temporal anomaly: law departments take process improvement seriously, and they expect outside counsel to do the same. Some law firms are outpacing their own clients in response.

These are all signs, to my way of thinking, of a fundamental shift in the nature of law firms. Specifically, law firms are changing from entities composed almost entirely of tangible assets to entities composed increasingly of intangible ones.

The conventional wisdom on law firms has always been that “all their assets walk out the door every night” — and that the firms could only hope those assets walked back in the next morning. Suppose they didn’t come back? Take the lawyers out of a law firm; what have you got left? Reams of documents, files, and transactions — but no one to read, write, or process them. Capable and professional support staff — but with no one to support. Libraries full of case law and regulation, shelves lined with texts and CLE binders, filing cabinets crammed with precedents — but nobody to apply legal skills and expertise to convert them into actionable outcomes of value to clients. The law firm machine would stand idle, because its engines had disappeared.

Just as importantly, all these non-lawyer assets differed hardly at all from firm to firm. Law libraries were mostly indistinguishable in their collections; precedents varied so little as to be virtually copies of one another; workflow and operational procedures were standard across almost every type of firm. The only features of a firm that could legitimately be said to be exceptional, standing out from other firms, were its individual lawyers. Many of them were pretty general-issue as well, to be sure, but most brought at least some unique value to the table, and a few brought an enormous amount. So in the absence of lawyers, law firms would be true commodities: offering basically the same thing to everyone in the market, bereft of any valuable distinction.

This state of affairs has contributed greatly to the individual lawyer’s longstanding dominance of law firm strategies, priorities, and practices. More than three years ago, I wrote about the existential battle inside every law firm between individual lawyers and the law firm as an enterprise — one that the enterprise has been losing since the day battle was first joined. Law firms continue their mad pursuit of lateral partner acquisition strategies, and go to absurd lengths to retain the services of highly skilled lawyers, because lawyers have always held such enormous importance to the firms’ survival and competitiveness. When your enterprise has only one type of asset of value to the market, you don’t own that asset — that asset owns you.

It seems to me that it’s precisely this state of affairs that all these foregoing efforts will change. What these law firms are building, through their investment in technology and processes and non-lawyer sources of value, are intangible assets. These assets can provide legal answers or deliver legal outcomes of value to clients in some circumstances, thereby giving firms a second type of option for serving those clients. But unlike lawyers, these assets won’t leave the office at the end of the day, and they don’t ask for raises or demand larger offices or threaten to join the firm down the street — they serve the firm, not themselves. By building these assets, firms give themselves leverage over their lawyers, and they’re going to use it. These are the new engines of the law firm machine. And they’re going to multiply with astonishing speed.

The role of these process and technology assets is not to replace lawyers — most of these resources require lawyers to program or monitor them on an ongoing basis — but to reduce lawyers’ indispensability to the firm. An “indispensable employee” sounds like a great idea, until you have one. I once managed an indispensable employee, and it didn’t take me long to realize that I needed to make him “dispensable” — for the good of the organization, and ultimately, for his own good as well. I trained other people in the work that he did and had them develop relationships with his key contacts. The point wasn’t to get to a place where I could fire him; it was to get to a place where, once he eventually left the organization for better things (as it was always clear he would do), the organization carried on and he could go without feeling guilty about leaving us in the lurch. Law firms need to make their lawyers more dispensable, for everyone’s good.

The other important goal that law firms accomplish by investing in intangible resources is to start building firm-specific assets. Littler’s CaseSmart system exists only at Littler, Seyfarth Lean is unique to Seyfarth, and so on. Other firms likely will create similar programs and systems in due course, but what they create won’t be exactly the same, and rightly so — these assets will be native to each firm’s culture and structure. Building firm-specific assets is about creating “a resource that will produce its highest economic value only within the specific firm,” Prof. William Henderson wrote last year. “If a lawyer leaves, the underlying resource remains, with the result that client loyalties flow primarily to the law firm, rather than the lawyer.”

This is a significant point. Partners will continue to leave law firms, perhaps taking junior lawyers and important clients with them; but they won’t be able to take these intangible assets along for the trip. And the existence of those assets, if they make lawyers’ work easier and firms more productive and their deliverables more valuable, might well prompt some of those juniors and some of those clients to stick around. The expertise that firms generate around these assets is specific to the firm and can’t be applied directly anywhere else, making retention easier and, eventually, making recruitment of talent and acquisition of clients easier as well.

The rise of the intangible law firm will be aided and abetted by more sophisticated law firm marketing and branding efforts, too. Traditionally, law firms often defaulted to lawyer-centred marketing: hire us, because we have all these great lawyers! Every time a firm promoted a star lawyer in its marketing material or trumpeted the poaching of a key partner from another firm, however, it was actually undermining its own institutional brand — it was giving clients yet another reason to say, “I hire the lawyer, not the firm.” The rise of intangible assets will strengthen firms’ efforts to market themselves as enterprises whose value and identities are independent of their lawyers. The goal is to have clients routinely say, “I hire the firm” — full stop.

I’m not saying that individual lawyers will soon be irrelevant to a law firm’s value proposition; this isn’t an either-or proposition. Firm-specific, technology-enabled, intangible assets aren’t an attack on lawyers; they’re a means to eliminate a longstanding, unhealthy imbalance in the relationship between the law firm as a commercial institution and the lawyers who deliver value inside it. The best lawyers, especially the immensely skilled ones on whose efforts clients bet their existence, will always be able to name their price and choose their platform. But that’s not the kind of work that’s going to dominate the legal market from now on. The dominant type of work will not be “bet the company,” but “run the company,” and the firms best positioned to win this work will be those with the kind of consistent, reliable, immovable, and uniquely valuable assets that clients can confidently count on.

Take a quick inventory of your own firm’s assets. How many are tangible and how many are intangible? How many walk out the door and how many stay overnight? And how prepared are you to compete for talent and business in a market where you can’t afford to let your lawyers walk, but your rivals can? Because that’s the market that’s unfolding in front of us right now.

Book No. 1: Content Marketing and Publishing Strategies for Law Firms

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Posted in: Books, Marketing, Stem

Anyone who’s spoken with me in the last few years knows that, whenever I’m asked what my future plans include, my response invariably concludes with: “… and I really want to write a book.” So I’m really, truly happy to announce this week the publication of not one, but two books bearing my name.
BookCoveri

Book number 1 — I’ll announce Book #2 later this week — is a co-production with my friend and colleague Steve Matthews, founder and president of Stem Legal Web Enterprises. Content Marketing And Publishing Strategies For Law Firms has just been published by The Ark Group, one of the legal industry’s most respected publishers of high-quality books about the business of law. This book represents all the distilled knowledge and insights that Steve and I have gathered, over our combined three-plus decades in the legal marketplace, about publishing and content marketing for law firms.

What’s in the book? Take a look at the executive summary (PDF) for an overview; this excerpt sums up the book’s purpose nicely:

A publishing strategy is the critical link between the firm’s overall business development strategy and its content marketing efforts. It clarifies the firm’s publishing goals, its intended audience, its targeted content, its chosen methodologies, and its measures of success. It is the strategic framework within which all content marketing efforts take place.

We are now at a critical juncture in content marketing: how law firms proceed in these next several months may make or break all future efforts within the firm to conduct marketing based on published content. 

There is no shortage of material available to lawyers and law firms regarding the use of content marketing and social media. But there is a paucity of information about the strategic context within which these efforts should take place, and about the role of “publishing’”as the lens through which these efforts should be viewed. This report aims to fill that gap.

For a further preview, you can even download the first chapter of the book, “The Law Firm Publishing Strategy,” for free (PDF).

What do we talk about in Content Marketing And Publishing Strategies For Law Firms? Among many other things:

  • Designing a strategy to guide your firm’s publishing efforts and integrating it with your business development and branding strategies.
  • Choosing the best platforms for your published content, including blogs, newsletters, microsites and other vehicles.
  • Distributing your content through a growing universe of channels, from magazines and other “old” media to Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus and other “new” media.
  • Creating a “publishing culture” within your firm, motivating and enforcing participation in and contributions to the publishing strategy.
  • Measuring the effectiveness of publishing efforts, with detailed explanations of the best metrics and tools to gauge the return on your publishing investments.

I encourage you to download the sample chapter and executive summary — and, if you like what you see, to visit the Ark Group for information on how to order Content Marketing And Publishing Strategies For Law Firms today. This book collects the best advice and insights Steve and I can provide about law firm publishing, content marketing, and social media strategies: we’re confident you’d find it an indispensable addition to your strategic arsenal.

Oh, and that second book? Here’s a teaser: it’s published by my friends at Attorney At Work, and it’s a strategic guide for law firms — but I’ve already said too much….

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.

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.

How to compete on price

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Posted in: Competition, Marketing

One of the oldest pieces of marketing advice in the legal profession is: “Don’t compete on price.” Wiser heads than mine constantly warn lawyers not to cut their prices to match what other sellers are providing, that engaging in a price war for legal services is as potentially ruinous as getting involved in a land war in Asia. There are at least three reasons for this:

1. Price wars are a death spiral. Every time you reduce your fees for a service to undercut a competitor, you set off a chain reaction whereby everyone in the market goes one step lower until even the “winners” can’t turn a profit. (Although read this James Surowiecki column for a counter-intuitive take on price wars.)

2. Price-cutting leads to quality reduction. It’s simple: if you’re not bringing in as much money for the same work, you need to cut back somewhere else: firing an able assistant, scrimping on new supplies, taking on more files than you can competently handle. (Although read the rest of this post for my thoughts on cutbacks.)

3. Price is an important marketplace signal. Unsophisticated buyers (and in the law, that’s most buyers) want the best deal, but they also worry about services that seem too cheap to be true. Lawyers offer a top-quality product, and a robust price for that product gives buyers confidence in its quality. (Although it’s perilous to count on the continuing ignorance of your customer base.)

So it’s both sensible and logical to tell lawyers not to compete on price. Yet for all that, I’ve come to believe that it’s not good advice anymore. I think we need to learn, as a profession, how to compete on price in ways that sustain our businesses.

It’s fine, in the abstract, for a lawyer to refuse to match or beat a rival’s lower price for a given product or service. The first few times a lawyer loses a client that way, she can content herself that she held the line against the devaluation of her services and that a client who only cares about price will be a difficult client throughout. But what happens when she loses the fifth client, or the tenth, or the fiftieth, because of price? What happens when clients start to consistently say, “I can get these services at a substantially lower price down the street,” or “I like working with you, but I can’t justify the premium that you charge”?

Many lawyers are already in this boat — much of the residential real estate bar, for instance. For these lawyers, refusing to compete on price is not a practical option, because their clients have made clear that price is the most important factor in their purchasing decision. There’s little point in charging what you believe is a fair price if no one’s buying at that price. Worse, more lawyers are going to join that boat over the course of this decade, as technology, collaboration, globalization, and regulatory change combine to rearrange the competitive landscape. We may complain about low-priced “non-lawyer” competitors and denigrate the quality of their work, but if clients buy what they sell at those prices, that’s going to affect what everyone else can charge. And not only will the quality of their offerings improve over time, but it also won’t be only “non-lawyers” doing it. Whether we like it or not, price will become a significant competitive factor, and it will be dangerous to run our businesses pretending otherwise.

So what can we do? The risks of constant price reductions detailed above are all too real, yet the day will soon come where we have to lower our prices just to stay in the marketplace conversation. If you can upgrade the type and quality of your services to premium or luxury levels and therefore maintain or even increase your prices, good for you. But there’s only so much room at the top of the mountain and not everyone can stand there; and in any event, raising the quality of what you offer often requires increasing what you spend to offer it, getting you no farther ahead.

But you don’t need to compete on price if you can go one better: compete on cost. Reduce the inefficiencies in your practice, streamline your processes, systematize where feasible, outsource if possible, reallocate resources to match the appropriate level of talent to the appropriate sophistication of tasks. This isn’t about freezing salaries or eliminating positions or taking away free coffee or all the other myopic expense-reduction steps many law firms took during the financial crisis. This is about restructuring your business in smart ways that reduce waste, cut down on system leakage, fine-tune your engines and upgrade your capacity.

Competing on cost means you spend less to get the same results as your law firm competitors, and puts you on an even footing with the non-firm competitors currently storming the gates. No matter what happens in the marketplace, one rule never changes: profit = revenue – expenses. Even if your revenue is down, you’ll still turn a profit if your expenses are down further: the lawyer who charges $500 for services that cost him $200 is doing better than the lawyer who charges $1,000 for services that cost him $900. You can’t control what the market will pay you; but you can control, to a large extent, what you spend to compete in that market. If you ever expect to seriously offer fixed fees to the marketplace, you absolutely must start by competing on cost.

Here are some examples of how you can compete on cost:

– Install a legal project management system. Probably the simplest way to introduce business efficiencies to your law firm is to adopt the principles of legal project management. From a basic back-of-the-envelope process for doing certain tasks systematically all the way up to a full-scale Lean Six Sigma re-engineering of your entire operation, you’ll wind up with clearer goals, more explicit processes, more efficient systems and increased productivity.

– Automate anything repetitive that moves. Your client intake system, your most frequent inquiries, your most common procedures, your most familiar routines: if the same basic task occurs more than occasionally in your firm, it should be converted into a template, a checklist, a document assembly system, or some other means by which completion is made faster, variation is made more difficult, and fewer resources are expended needlessly.

– Move work up and down the talent chain. Move dictation and transcription from secretaries down to voice-recognition devices. Move legal research to freelance specialists across town or outside the country. Move administrative tasks to virtual assistants. Move e-discovery to people or systems actually qualified to do it. Then train the people who used to do low-value work in high-value skills like project management, business development, human resources and so forth. Same people, same resources, but better allocated and with new capabilities.

– Use technology wherever possible. Practice management software, on your server or preferably in the cloud, delivers huge efficiency gains. Specialized accounting software for law offices reduces errors and improves productivity. Take advantage of low-cost, internet-based contact management systems. Give serious thought to going paperless, or at least paper-less. If you’re already using these tools, constantly train your staff to become more proficient with them. Exploit what Dave Bilinsky calls the “new leverage”: using technology to achieve higher rates of return on each hour of work.

– Give serious thought to outsourcing. There’s one reason big firms like WilmerHale and CMS Cameron McKenna have struck deals with legal process outsourcing firms to move millions of dollars worth of business and back-office functions to smaller centers: efficiency gains that help them compete on cost. To be sure, there are human costs to be dealt with, but if you take a hard look at the numbers, you might find the logic of outsourced operations to be inescapable.

– Come up with a non-hourly billing and compensation system. It probably goes without saying that the single biggest inefficiency in most law firms is the fact that tasks are worth more the longer they take and the more resources they consume. Hourly billing — and more importantly in this context, hourly compensation — is a productivity hemorrhage that’s becoming far more damaging to firms than to clients. And it is not sustainable.

You can probably look around your office right now and find five ways that costs could be reduced or efficiencies could be introduced without a corresponding drop in quality (and maybe even an increase). Most often, the reasons why your firm avoids dealing with these inefficiencies are personal or political or both. But it’s not mission impossible, as the saying goes; only mission difficult. And I would suggest that as of right now, it’s also mission critical. Getting a grip on and eliminating inefficiency in a positive, sensible way is probably the most under-valued tool law firms possess to increase their productivity.

If there’s a downside to this approach, I don’t see it. Suppose that none of these dire warnings come to pass, and that the legal marketplace remains the safe, cozy, bloated anachronism it’s always been. By making cost competition a strategic priority, you’ll have increased your profitability vis-a-vis your rival firms, channeled more money to your partners, become more attractive to potential lateral hires, and given your firm the leverage, if you ever wanted, to make your rivals compete on price on your terms.

But say the marketplace erupts in the ways I’ve been describing, and hyper-efficient competitors emerge that can beat your usual fees by 30, 50, 70 percent or more. Without a streamlined operation in place and no time to install one in the chaos and pressure facing you, you run the serious risk of becoming another victim of market change. But if you’ve already prepared to beat these new entrants at their own game, you’ll at least have a fighting chance. Competing on price might be a necessary evil, but competing on cost can be the key to your success.

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

Trust and the marketing department

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Posted in: Management, Marketing

Timothy Corcoran’s excellent and essential new blog tracks and expands upon a provocative article at the AmLaw Daily called “How essential is a CMO?” As many large firms scale back their marketing spending or lose their Chief Marketing Officers, Tim finds both lawyers and marketers can share some blame. I was especially drawn to this dead-on observation:

BigLaw partners operate under the amusing notion that a flat governance model in which every partner is an equal owner with equal authority is somehow a rational business choice, when in fact it’s an inefficient, extraordinarily dilutive and disruptive structure that persists due to inertia.  To be clear, the partners can organize their sandbox however they want, but this scenario rewards senior marketers who have learned to please partners above advancing the financial interests of the firm.  Indeed, there are countless examples of experienced marketers from other disciplines stymied by the bizarre world of BigLaw.

As one CMO put it to me without irony, “Success in a large law firm is all about credibility, which means accepting that we don’t often do things the right way, we do them our partners’ way, but after about a year of serving their needs you should have built up enough credibility to gently make suggestions, most of which they’ll discard, but to survive you can’t try to do too much too quickly.”

Politics and personality do take on outsized importance in a large enterprise, such that the merits of any given initiative often take a back seat to figuring out which important people’s interests require catering or flattering. By effectively giving every partner veto power over business decisions, law firms make that situation a lot worse. Appeasement replaces innovation, expectations are lowered repeatedly, and pretty soon nobody has the heart to try anything new. It’s no way to run a business of any substantial size, and if non-lawyer ownership of law firms ever catches on worldwide, that might well be the beginning of the end for this model.

For the foreseeable future, though, the flat partnership structure is a fact of life.  But I tend to think the organizational model per se isn’t the problem so much as the fact that many lawyers seem incapable of letting other professionals do their jobs without interference or second-guessing.

Lawyers seem to come factory-shipped with the notion that they know better than you how to do things you’ve been trained to do. People who work with or for lawyers — secretaries, paralegals, marketers, recruiters, PD experts, consultants, and so on — can all relate eye-rolling stories of lawyers who really believe that their fleeting sentiments on a given subject merit equal consideration to what the trained professional in question has advised. It seems that only IT people escape this kind of treatment, probably because many lawyers are intimidated by anything more technological than a BlackBerry.

But marketing seems to get the worst of it. I’ve heard one business consultant, who has worked with professionals in numerous fields, say that nobody treats their own marketing people with as little respect as lawyers do. Many qualified law firm marketers are reduced to menial publicity tasks after yet another initiative of real substance has been stalled or buried. I’ve seen worthwhile legal marketing and branding campaigns snuffed out because one or two lawyers in the room didn’t like a particular tag line, image, or even colour scheme in an advertisement — even when it’s made clear that the campaigns are not directed to lawyers at all, but to clients.

Why are lawyers so prone to this kind of behaviour? Some of it certainly can be traced to the particular strain of arrogance that legal training seems to inculcate. Being a lawyer can operate as a kind of expertise multiplier, making a small knowledge base suddenly seem much larger. My English degree may be gathering dust in a closet somewhere, but I can at least remember Pope’s Essay on Criticism: “A little learning is a dangerous thing /Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring / There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain.”

But I think a lot of it comes down to trust — many lawyers are just plain reluctant to trust the opinions and instincts of people from outside the profession. One of the reasons lawyers invite a colleague into partnerships is that they trust the lawyer’s skills and acumen — a partner by definition is someone you trust without even thinking about it. I wonder if one of the reasons most ethics rules prohibit “non-lawyer” (a hateful phrase) admission to partnership is that lawyers can’t quite bring themselves to grant that same level of trust to those outside the bar. Yes, you’re qualified and diligent, experienced and savvy — but you’re not a lawyer, and that still matters for some reason. Few lawyers trust the merits of something they can’t authenticate through direct experience; most lawyers have never marketed; and marketing looks easy from the outside.

This is more than just an annoying quirk — this is a major obstacle to the efficient operation of legal enterprises of all sizes. If you’re constantly overruling or second-guessing or stymieing the best efforts of your qualified professional associates — if you just can’t accept that someone without a law degree knows more about a business management issue than you do — then you’re wasting time, missing opportunities and burning money. Law firms everywhere are doing all three, at a time when the importance of these professionals to the firm’s survival has never been greater.

Successful law firms have figured out that there are some things lawyers do very well and some things that other professionals do very well, and they delegate authority accordingly. Good lawyers do more than just hire a marketing or recruitment or strategic professional — they trust them enough to follow their advice and give them enough room to operate. Good lawyers have the  wisdom to accept that they don’t know everything and the confidence to yield control to those better qualified. Of course they consult with these professionals and raise concerns when they have them. But at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for trust and no disguising its absence.  If you don’t trust your professionals to do the jobs you hired them to do, everyone in the firm figures it out pretty quickly and behaves accordingly.

So the fundamental problem might not be that lawyers can torpedo or hijack a given initiative. The problem is that they do, often reflexively, without sufficient grounds. Few lawyers have the discipine and confidence to keep from wading into unfamiliar waters until they’re over their head. Law firm leaders need to keep improving trust between a firm’s lawyers and its other professionals, until the latter can maximize the firm’s value and effectiveness without having to constantly look over their shoulder at the former.

Figuring out Twitter

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Posted in: Marketing, Publishing

I’ve been on Twitter for a little more than six months now, and in that time, I’ve assembled a loose collection of reasons not to follow people. As a general rule,  I won’t follow your Twitter feed if:

  • your Twitter account doesn’t show your name or link to a web page
  • you’ve been on Twitter for more than half an hour and you don’t have a photo
  • you’ve posted hardly any updates before following me
  • you’ve protected your updates, giving me no reason to follow you
  • your ratio of following-to-followed is more than 5 to 1
  • your updates are mostly links to your blog posts or press releases
  • more than half your updates are RTs of people I already follow
  • not one of your last 20 updates contains a link I feel like clicking on
  • you’re selling something (a product, service, cause or belief)
  • your posts are political and bitter, or political and smug
  • you’re Oprah Winfrey

Many of these are characteristics of Twitterers who aren’t all that interested in their followers or inclined to find out what those followers might find worthwhile. They don’t want a conversation, they just want an audience  — a “follower”  in the narrowest sense of the word. They also seem to constitute the majority of Twitter users, and unfortunately, they include more than a few lawyers, legal professionals and legal industry suppliers. This doesn’t mean lawyers shouldn’t use Twitter, but it does mean they need to use it well, which means they need to understand what to use it for.

I’m coming to think it’s a mistake to describe Twitter to lawyers as a marketing tool, for a couple of reasons. First, most lawyers don’t really know what marketing is or how to do it properly, so they end up doing it as badly on Twitter as they do on their websites or in their advertisements. They think marketing is about telling everyone how amazing they are, which is why they talk far more about themselves than they do about clients. And clients, reasonably enough, find that dull and kind of insulting, so they tune it out.

But secondly, and more importantly, Twitter isn’t and was never meant to be a marketing mechanism. Twitter is a communications mechanism — it’s a publishing tool, and the way to use it successfully is to approach it like a publisher. That means learning who your readers are, finding out what they care about, and finding a way to supply it to them or point them in its direction. It’s not about you and what you have, it’s about them and what they need.

For what it’s worth, here’s how I use Twitter. First, I hardly ever talk about myself: what I’m doing, where I’m going, how I’m feeling, what I’m eating, etc. I assume you don’t care, so I don’t bring it up. Secondly, although I do link to my blog posts (and I get a lot of traffic from Twitter), I try to make those posts the exception — the rare commercials in between the programming. What I spend most of my Twitter time doing is trying to find good programming — worthwhile content. It comes in four main varieties:

1. A link to an article I think people will find interesting but that doesn’t merit a full blog post — a microblog (Dennis Kennedy pioneered this in the legal Twittersphere). I keep an eye on a number of legal, media and general news services, looking for something that will interest people who are following me; where possible, I add a short editorial comment of some value.

2. A response to a question or a point someone has raised in reply to an update. Again, I try to make sure the reply has some original content or additional observation that furthers the discussion (obviously a challenge in 140 characters). I also try to keep these exchanges brief, on the theory that people aren’t interested in hearing an extended conversation (or worse, half of one, if they don’t follow the other person).

3. A retweet (or RT) of something other users have said or linked to — I try not to overdo this, especially for Twitterers whom I know have a large following that overlaps with mine (I know I get tired of reading the same post RT’ed by three or four people who all read the same Twitter account that I do).

4. Less formal stuff: expressing thanks to people who’ve RTed my blog post (I always try to track those, and my gratitude is always genuine) or linking to something I found odd or amusing.  (I’ll confess a weakness for breaking news, which is a bad habit — racing to be the first to relay a big event, happy or sad, carries the tang of sensationalism or exploitation.)

In the result, my Twitter feed is a personalized news service, but not about me — about what I find interesting. It gives you information and perspectives that I consider useful, insightful or entertaining, relayed to you in the hope that you’ll share my sentiments about them and find value in them as I did.

The price of that feed — the advertising, if you like — is the occasional update about a new blog post. I know that those advertisements work, because my Twitter feed has driven more regular traffic here. But although that’s a clear benefit from Twittering, it’s not the reason why I Twitter — I do it because I like informing people about things that, based on their interest in my feed, I know we share a common interest in. You can call that marketing if you like, but it’s the very definition of publishing.

Of course, most lawyers aren’t publishers, and their interest in Twitter extends only so far as there are tangible benefits to their business (and rightly so). But I think the same principles that guide my Twitter use can apply to lawyers’ hard-nosed business use of Twitter.

Above all, you need to remember that no one reads Twitter because they care about you — they do it because they care about themselves. So talk to them, and talk about them. Give them links to news and knowledge that benefit them, no matter where these links lead (even, I’d go so far as to say, to a competitor’s website). Offer tips, pithy observations, and checklists in serial form (no one uses Twitter this way better than Matt Homann). Ask questions relevant to your practice area, and blog the results (and link to the post from Twitter, of course). Strive to make your Twitter feed an important source of knowledge to your readers.

But, you say, how do you know what your Twitter followers care about? Well, you could do what I did: accidentally and organically assemble a group of people who must be interested in what I have to say on Twitter. Or you could take a serious client-development approach to it. Here are some steps you should consider if you really intend to use Twitter as a business tool.

  • Conduct a Twitter audit — if you don’t know who your readers are, you’re not going to derive much business value from it. Make a list of your followers, divide them into current or potential clients and the merely curious, and cultivate relationships via email or direct messages with the former group.
  • Use the @yourname function to figure out who’s RTing you, and send these people very nice personal notes — they’re  doing your Twitter marketing for you, and for free.
  • Solicit feedback on your Twitter updates — create an email address, twitter@yourfirm.com, to which people can send criticisms, questions and ideas. Then act on them.
  • On a regular basis, assemble your best Twitter updates into a blog post — as Steve Matthews says, Twitter is a river, and most people step in and out of it only occasionally, so make sure your pearls of wisdom are collected for future reference — theirs and yours. (Steve’s list of Twitter do’s and don’ts, just posted at Slaw, far outstrips anything I have to say here).

Finally, don’t concern yourself with how many followers you have — it’s a meaningless statistic, not least because a lot of people are gaming the system to try to build up impressive-looking follower totals, to make themselves look more popular than they deserve or just to stroke their egos. Concentrate on quality over quantity — ten loyal readers, any of whom could bring you business any day, are worth more than a  thousand followers who added you out of curiosity, reflex or politeness.

The only point of using a communications and publishing tool like Twitter is to know who your readers are, know what they care about, and provide it to them. If you do that right, you’ll establish yourself as a trusted source of knowledge in an area of importance — which, last I checked, is what marketing is about anyway.

Deconstructing prestige

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Posted in: Big Firms, Marketing

I’m currently taking part in an intriguing conversation at Legal OnRamp about the reasons why GCs hire prestigious, big-name law firms. A recurring theme in the discussion is that in-house lawyers often default to using big, well-known (and often highly inefficient) firms because of the protection these firms’ prestige affords to corporate counsel. Just as no one was ever fired for buying IBM, as the old saying went, no one gets fired for sending important and potentially calamitous work to Famous & Expensive LLP: “I paid top dollar for Top Law Firm, so don’t blame me for what happened.”

My contribution thus far has been to ask (a) whether  that protection actually materializes in practice, (b) how much outside counsel work is so important that it requires the F&E imprimatur, and (c) if any GC has yet been fired for failing to rein in outside counsel costs. The whole conversation might eventually form the basis of a separate post. But it does lead me to a related and I think pretty important subject: what “law firm prestige” itself actually represents.

“Prestige” is one of those words, like “professionalism” and “value,” that we throw around a lot in the law without establishing exactly what we mean by it. Interestingly, trace its etymology back to Middle French and you’ll find it originally referred to an illusion or a conjuror’s trick, a sleight-of-hand; if you’ve ever wondered where the old magician’s standby “Presto!” comes from, you have your answer. That’s something to keep in mind when considering law firms’ “prestige” — that we’re talking more about the appearance or suggestion of merit than we are about the actual presence of merit itself.

Let’s say an in-house counsel purchases a law firm’s services at least in part because he expects that firm’s “prestige” will provide effective cover against adverse outcomes. The clear implication, I would think, is that that prestige reflects a higher quality of service and/or results, as compared with less well-known or less “prestigious” firms — otherwise, why would it be relevant to the question of whether the corporate counsel made the right call? This implies that there’s a rational, measurable connection between a prestigious, well-known name and better, more reliable results.

But is that actually the case? And it it’s not, are clients who rely on “prestige” when making their legal purchasing decisions doing little more than buying smoke and mirrors?

Let’s break this down: what are the elements of “prestige”? Does it involve longevity? Maybe — but Thacher Proffitt & Wood just disappeared in its 160th year. Is it about having a stable of famous clients? Maybe — but Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Northern Rock, Circuit City, Nortel, the Tribune Company and many others, not to mention GM and Chrysler, all retained prestigious firms. Is it about having the “best” lawyers? Maybe — but considering that partner movement is now so frequent among large firms that the AmLaw Daily has a regular section called “The Churn,” I’m not sure how  the fleeting presence of individual lawyers can affect prestige.

It seems to me that, like the old SCOTUS definition of obscenity, many people believe they know prestige when they see it. I’m dubious. As far as I can tell, among the constituent elements of law firm “prestige” today, along with longevity, name clients and name lawyers, are tony corporate addresses, marble-lined reception areas, old masters on the wall and in the corner office, a collection of long-past accomplishments, massive marketing expenditures, and often, just sheer size (a factor ably assisted by a legal media disproportionately interested in the largest of large law firms). Roll all these together and Presto! You have a prestigious law firm.

When a general counsel tells the board of directors that he protected the company’s interests by hiring a prestigious law firm, those directors assume that a law firm’s prestige is rationally and demonstrably connected to a higher quality of service and results. I don’t know that that’s a safe assumption. I don’t know if there’s a direct correlation between a firm’s prestige and its excellence or reliability. And since that assumed connection is actually the fundamental premise upon which is based many general counsels’ hiring rationales, I’d say this is something worth exploring in some more detail.

Because if that premise is flawed — if prestige, however we define it, isn’t rationally connected to quality of service, results or satisfaction — then that’s a pretty major obstacle to the efficient operation of the legal services marketplace.

Branding, blogging and the attention economy

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Posted in: Diversity, Marketing, Technology

Every online community loves a meta-conversation, a discussion about the community itself, and the blawgosphere is no exception. But even by those standards, the explosion of posts ignited by a law.com article on women law bloggers was remarkable for its strength and immediacy.

Published yesterday, the article posited a relative absence of women blawggers (rather ironically, considering the term “blawg” was coined by Denise Howell) and suggested various hypotheses to explain the shortage. Within 24 hours, the article had touched off responses across the blawgosphere, from Nicole Black, Ann Althouse, Mary Dudziak, Christine Hurt, Diane Levin, and Laurie Mapp, along with Scott Greenfield and Robert Ambrogi.

The upshot of most of these posts is that the writer failed to look deeply enough into the legal blogosphere, restricting her research to the most highly trafficked sites and those of large law firms. While that’s true, I also think there’s something to be said for male law bloggers’ tendency to link to other men disproportionately more than to women. I think it’s also worth noting that if there is a serious paucity of women bloggers, it’s mostly inside of law firms, especially the larger ones. I may be verging on cynicism here, but I think that’s largely because two things law firms don’t tend to take very seriously are the careers of their women lawyers and the utility of blogs.

Several bloggers also pointed out that until this article asked the question, it had never occurred to them to think about the gender of the other bloggers they read or linked to — it was of the sheerest irrelevance. My own blogroll includes bloggers like Carolyn Elefant, Susan Cartier Liebel, Connie Crosby, Merrilyn Astin Tarlton, and Penelope Trunk, but until I made that list, I had never thought about the male-female breakdown. Ditto for the people I follow on Twitter, including most of the above as well as Victoria Pynchon, Mina Sirkin, Donna Seale, Kelly Phillips Erb, and too many others to list. But just because I haven’t thought about blawggers’ gender before isn’t an excuse to not think about it now, and I’m glad for the opportunity to learn about more women law bloggers worth reading.

But what really struck me among all the posts on this topic, and what I’m really interested in writing about today, came from Ann Althouse. Responding to the suggestion in the original article that women avoid blogging because they’re more prone to professional or personal attack, she wrote: “The internet is not going to coddle and comfort you. In fact, the internet wants you out of here.” [Emphasis in original] While the delivery is a little harsh, I think this is a powerful and profound statement, and every lawyer who intends to build her or her profile and brand online needs to be aware of it and accept it. Continue Reading