How your firm develops this new model depends a great deal, of course, on the nature of your practice – its specialties, its client base, its location and other variables. The accompanying model can provide useful general guidance as you transform a “traditional” practice into a more dynamic legal business that can meet the challenges of the model legal market.
The top segment, “unique legal expertise,” represents distinctive services requiring the highest level of skills. Clients typically tap well-established firms for these types of services, particularly firms with a highly specific expertise. Examples of such expertise include private equity practices, litigation boutiques and IP firms, as well as specialists in matters relating to high technology. For clients of such firms, cost is usually not determinative in hiring.
The middle segment, “comprehensive legal services,” represents more common services offered by most broad-based practices. These services can include contracts, regulatory issues and business dispute resolution. This service segment is a highly competitive realm, where clients are looking not only for a well-regarded firm but also one that can provide service efficiently and cost-effectively. These clients tend to shop around for the lowest-cost provider.
The bottom segment, “ancillary support services,” comprises the types of law-related services increasingly available from specialty firms that aren’t law firms per se, such as ALSPs. Such services include document review and coding, electronic discovery support, non-legal research, and the like. Clients tap these specialty firms chiefly for their lower cost and greater efficiency. At the same time, a successful supplier of these services must demonstrate reliability and high-quality results.
The model makes it clear which firms provide the most highly valued and least cost-sensitive services. In evaluating your own firm’s capabilities, for example, you might determine that “unique legal expertise” doesn’t accurately fit your service offerings. Nevertheless, your firm still can offer real value to your clients. Having a relatively “lower value” practice in monetary terms should not be viewed as a complete value judgment on your firm. In fact, in its 2018 Dynamic Law Firms Study, Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor research revealed that firms judged to be “high-performing” aren’t limited to a particular size, location or practice.
A high-performing practice, a practice whose value to its clients is reflected in its strong profitability and growing clientele, is one that builds upon its strengths – and willingly adjusts its processes to the evolving realities of the legal market. In other words, it has both the legal and operational knowhow that builds a firm’s “value infrastructure,” one that delivers reliable, useful information and service in a timely, cost-effective manner.
If you determine that your firm must improve its operational performance, there are many ways to do so. The strategies you use will depend on what you see as your firm’s strengths–and the areas needing a boost in efficiency and value.
Invest in technologies and online platforms that can streamline processes. These can include automated document drafting and editing. Other technology solutions can keep your clients up to date via email about their cases – communication they will value and, often, require.
Technology also can augment your firm’s expertise. For experienced staff, a knowledge management system can make that institutional knowledge more accessible and normalized across the whole of your firm. For junior associates and for law firms serving a wide variety of legal matters, knowledge solutions like Practical Law can significantly boost capabilities. Those capabilities can include starting legal tasks supported by a professional guide or moving through a caseload with the confidence that the processes and information are valid and current.
