No option for Law Firm

I read an article in The Spectator a couple of months back that I’ve been meaning to tie into a Legal or Legal IT post for a while.

There were two areas of Law that I was thinking about when I first read it. First off this paragraph.

These changes happen because there are two kind of business competition. The first is where you try to be better at doing what the business next door is doing already. The second is where you create a ‘paradigm shift’, pursuing some entirely new ideal no one has focused on before.

This one got me thinking of the crossroads that a lot of law firms are reaching in these tough economic times. Do they try and do things better than their close competitors? Or do they create the “paradigm shift”? The majority of the press and many legal commentators would suggest that “Tesco Law” will usher in a new kind of law firm and the old firms that stick to the current model will wither and die. Is there room for the old style law firm anymore or will law pump out agreements “needlessly uniform and fast”? I suspect there’ll be room for both, after all the two businesses sited in the article (McDonalds and Starbucks) haven’t totally wiped out the “old diners” or the “old style cafés”.

The second area I thought of was after I read this.

I sometimes wonder whether it’s time for government to try a paradigm shift. If, instead of devoting all its energies towards huge, intractable problems such as wholesale NHS reform, our government were to establish a Ministry for Eradicating Trivial Irritations, some degree of success would be assured.

And this got me thinking of a few Legal IT vendors. How the clamber for larger firms through mergers and takeovers have led to a chase the next big thing. Whether it be the cloud, the latest in eDiscovery or Legal Hold or another big technology to sell to the law firms. My thoughts usually are that I wish they’d just look at what they do/did well and make it better. Ironing out those trivial but annoying “features” that drive the lawyers nuts.

Anyway, take a look at the article it’s worth a read in its entirety and perhaps read through some of the other articles by “The Wiki Man”.

The period of austerity seems to be over in football. The lateral hire is on the rise as players are swapping teams at a steadily increasing rate. It starts with the star players and the big teams, but soon enough the pay rates across the market will be pushed up and mediocre players will start costing the smaller teams big money.

As teams fight for survival in a competitive environment they start to lose focus on what their key purpose is (to please the fans) and chase the big annual prize at any cost. Soon costs spiral and the fan is squeezed of more and more money to pay for the increased cost of players and the need to get the big annual prize. Worse happens as the teams lose focus on what the fans want and start to employ different approaches that get them closer to the annual prize, but by reducing the quality of the end product they alienate their fans.

But at the end of the day shouldn’t it be about pleasing the fans and keeping the costs for them down? After all wasn’t that the reason all these teams started in the first place?

Don’t panic! I haven’t turned this blog into a sports blog, just re-read the above and substitute the words in italic. Replace football with legal, player with lawyer, team with firm and fan with client.

There seems to be a lot of movement in legal at the moment (examples here, here and here), combine this with an increasingly competitive market and there’s a lot lawyers could take from the modern football market.

Maybe rather than chasing the Balotelli’s the teams should look at their development programmes and start bringing on the next Giggs?  And on the United theme, don’t assume that just because you’re a BigLaw “Manchester United” that your fans will be happy regardless!

Have you ever thought that everything clients want from a law firm are things that our fee earner want from the Legal IT dept.?

I hadn’t thought of it this way until a colleague raised a number of points that were raised by some senior people from large global organisations at a recent conference.

"We want consistent service from a global service provider, even if it isn’t in the home market, we still want the same good service in a distant geography"

"We want a legal services team that really knows our business"

"Don’t do what we tell you, do what we need"

“We don’t want academic legal answers, we want relevant business explanations and solutions”

Change the wording slightly.

"We want consistent service from the central IT dept., even if it isn’t in our office, we still want the same good service in a distant geography"

"We want a legal IT team that really knows our business"

"Don’t do what we tell you, do what we need"

“We don’t want technical answers, we want relevant business explanations and solutions”

Makes sense doesn’t it!

Now I’ve been pondering how to sum this post up. Is there an answer to all the problems of delivering a great service in those points raised? I couldn’t come up with a nice black and white answer, but then maybe this is a case of a problem shared is a problem solved?

p.s. thanks must go to my colleague in Asia for this post, the points are plagiarised from him. cheers Andy!

No I didn’t stop blogging over the last three weeks to spend the time on the campaign trail for the Computer Weekly blog awards! I’ve just had too much on in and out of work to come up with something to blog about (which reminds me of a previous post!)

I’ve had in mind a post about the mergers in legal this year. A follow up to the post I put up in July 2009 titled “Consolidation within the UK 200?” in which I predicted a series of mergers outside the top 20. I thought at the time that the competition in the legal market due to the downturn would force a squeeze in the mid-sized firms, but it looks like the consolidation has been nearer the top. There have been a number of transatlantic mergers within the top 20 (well top 25), not the “magic circle” but in those firms just below (in fact those below the transatlantic trailblazer DLA Piper).

We’ve had Denton Wilde Sapte and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, Hammonds and Squire Sanders & Dempsey, Lovells and Hogan & Hartson and SJ Berwin in talks with Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe and then Proskauer Rose.

Norton Rose has taken a slightly different route into North America with it’s merger with Canadian firm Ogilvy Renault. It’s almost a shame UK law firms aren’t listed on the stock exchange as I’d be hedging a bet and buying up some shares in Herbert Smith!

So the consolidation is happening at a pace, but rather than on a national level it’s the globalisation of the larger law firms that’s leading the way.  I don’t think it’s over, there is still a mixed market out there. Some firms are now posting a rise in turnover, yet there are others that are posting an equal percentage drop.

I therefore stand by my earlier post. The consolidation at the top will only strengthen the brands of the large law firms, allowing them to hoover up more of the big (and medium) plc work. The mid sized firms will be subject to a pincer movement from the “big brand firms” above and also from the new firms that will emerge on the back of the Legal Services Act 2007.

What will the mid sized law firm look like in 5 years time? Will the £75m turnover “Jones, Jones and Smith” still exist or will they be background engine rooms for “Tesco” and “Sainsbury’s” in a legal world that has a few global big brand firms and household name branded legal services?

Whilst writing this post I came across a great document on the upcoming “Big Bang” for legal, it’s called “The Big Bang Report – Opportunities and threats in the new legal services market”.

Oh and no I didn’t win the IT professional (male) blogger award unfortunately, but it was great to be recognised by Computer Weekly and short-listed. Maybe next year!

I caught a status update of a ex-colleague of mine on LinkedIn regarding InterAction today.

“wondering if LinkedIn will be the death of InterAction for CRM”

Now I don’t know if this was just a sound bite as a result of a bad experience of InterAction he had today or a genuine question of the possibilities on Linked In?

But either way it is an interesting question. Have walled off contact and CRM systems reached end of life? LinkedIn certainly has gained popularity to the point where it is the de facto standard professional social network and with that comes a wealth of information on “who knows who” that an in house system couldn’t hope to capture.

Then like most social networking platforms it has an API. Now I’m not sure how open the LinkedIn API is but would it take too much work on say Tikit’s part to integrate their eMarketing suite?

As almost every Legal IT or Legal Marketing person that has used InterAction  will know the benefit comes from the data and therefore won’t it just take a small shift in LinkedIn technology to leverage the wealth of data it has in it for use in house?

So, in a week that has seen the demise of Ning as a free service, has fighting the de facto standard (in Nings case facebook) just become impossible in the long run? All it will take now is for facebook to shift it’s Fan page infrastructure slightly and introduce a private network facility and it’s bye bye Ning.

What do you think?