Category: Law

Delivering value

If Nick Jarrett-Kerr is right that the current downturn in work has removed the last excuse for partners avoiding to engage in valuable non-chargeable work (see his article in Kerma Partners Quarterly 2/08 and my earlier post Spending time wisely), then high on our list of things to look at is how to resolve the problem of a business model based primarily on selling time.

Although his post The new brand landscape for law firms in Law 21 is primarily aimed at law firm rebranding rights and wrongs, and is very well worth reading for that, Jordan Furlong also touches on billing and branding,

Today, brand opportunities are opening up everywhere — not primarily in new industries or practice areas, although there are a few of those, but in how a firm delivers value to its clients. Service delivery, billing parameters, value definition, client communications, risk sharing — these and many other key elements of customer relationships, which have lain dormant and ignored for years, are coming to sudden life.

Take the oldest complaint in the book — the billable hour system — as an example. Clients have moaned for decades about how the billable hour removes the burdens of accountability and risk from the lawyer (though clients share some of the blame for not pushing harder), and conventional wisdom called the billable hour unkillable.

But now there are firms that have successfully staked out this ground and branded themselves as having abandoned the billable hour altogether.

The mobile lawyer

Shortly after reading The Road Ahead in the latest Law Gazette (I will come back to that in a later post), I read Jordan Furlong’s post Lawyers in the smartphone era in Law 21.

I cannot help but feel somewhat depressed by Furlong’s vision of the future for lawyers, the consequence he anticipates of two smartphone-related developments.

The first is that thanks to smartphones, every lawyer is going to be mobile.It’s true that the Blackberry has already made itself a significant presence in the lives of many business lawyers, for better and for worse. But as a general rule, the lawyer’s center of gravity remains where it’s always been: her office, where she keeps her desk, chair, landline phone, files, books, and desktop computer. That center of gravity is now shifting to the lawyer herself. With the smartphones of the near future at her command, that lawyer will be able to do everything on the road — call, e-mail, Web browse, review files, read cases, write memos, etc. — that she now does in the office. In fact, it’ll be expected of her. A lawyer with a smartphone is a walking law firm — one that hardly ever closes. Lawyers who obsessively check their smartphone messages are considered antisocial nuisances today, but before long, they’ll be the norm. I’m not saying that’s good, but I am saying it’s pretty much inevitable.

In many ways, I think we are already there. It may not be smartphones yet in the UK, but the BlackBerry is ubiquitous, and for many lawyers it is not where their desk is that is important, but where their client’s desk is. For lawyers, as for many other professionals, mobility is essential (although I remain to be convinced by the BlackBerry).

And Furlong’s second impact category?

Among the tens of thousands of future applications [being developed by iPhone, BlackBerry, and others] will be many that deliver legal services directly to clients. For lawyers, this development could represent either a threat (yet another way in which computers are reducing traditional lawyer work to a series of algorithms) or an opportunity (someone with legal knowhow and experience has to design those algorithms; why not a law firm?). But either way, over the next decade, smartphones will become a legal service delivery medium. Now’s the time for lawyers to start dealing with that.

Some people will say that there’s no way a simple cellphone will ever be able to do lawyer work. Some people used to say that about computers, too. So I’ll take this opportunity to update one of my axioms: the problem won’t be  smartphones doing what lawyers can do; it’ll be lawyers continuing to do what smartphones can do.

When did you last see your father?

Research, conducted by HR consultancy Hudson UK, shows, if today’s report in The Lawyer is to be believed, that 30 per cent of legal professionals are so dissatisfied with their current role that they would not want to see their children in their job. Martin Luise, director of legal recruitment at Hudson, is quoted in Lawyers’ kids warned against following in their footsteps, as saying,

These findings are very disturbing, especially with the current economic conditions. That so many legal professionals would not want to see their children follow in their footsteps points to a workforce that is both unhappy and lacking confidence.

I don’t agree that the workforce is unhappy (or any more unhappy than any other profession’s workforce). Nor do I think it demonstrates a lack of confidence in the profession. Not wanting your children to follow in your footsteps does not necessarily mean that you are dissatisfied in your job. Instead, it is perhaps a realistic evaluation of where we see the profession in ten years, the opportunities that are available to Millenials that weren’t to us, and, more generally, changing attitudes and expectations.

Although I haven’t actively encouraged my children to consider law as a career; equally, had any of them wanted to do so, I would have encouraged them. A number of my friends (not lawyers) have asked me to talk to their children, and I have, and some are now lawyers. I have also always had trainees, at last count some 50 over the years, so have, at least at second hand, an understanding of what has driven a generation and a half of people to enter the law.

But closer to home, what put my children off, and they have made no bones about this, was the work. “We never saw you when we were little; you were always working” is what the eldest told me recently. That, I replied, is an occupational hazard for the children of a corporate transactional lawyer!