*Disclaimer* I’m a neophyte in the legal world. The following ideas may be half-baked, ill-conceived and/or starry-eyed. I’m a dreamer and I like to share what’s on my mind. If you see holes in my logic or ideas please let me know in the comments section.
I’ve been thinking about how I would run a law firm if I was in charge. With the wave of recent layoffs, the threat of outsourced legal solutions and technological innovations changing the way everyone does business it seems that change might be coming for many folks whether they like it or not.
Basic Concept: Small, scalable litigation shop focused on balancing quality of life, excellent service and superior usage of available technology. The firm would be run like a dot-com start-up.
Why small? Given the ballooning salaries of the past few years it seems logical to make every effort to keep overhead low. This would be accomplished by running a virtual office utilizing apps built on the cloud like Google Wave. Staying lean gives us a larger margin and allows profits to go to partners instead of office space. It also provides an opportunity to avoid wasteful bureaucracy and insures we’re agile enough to outmaneuver competitors.
Why scalable? Litigation often comes in spurts and goes through tough times (like now) when the economy hits the skids. Rather than retaining full-scale support on a permanent basis we would employ contract attorneys for document intensive review, overseas e-discovery, coding and forensics help as necessary and virtual assistants to handle much of the paralegal work. The core team of 5-10 partners/members would always be in place but would still work virtually.
Quality of Life
From a professional perspective the firm would be run using an open business model that stressed transparency and equity in making business decisions. Each partner would have an equal say in what cases we chose to work on and the distribution of work would be influenced by the methodology suggested in the theory of participatory economics as viewed through the lens of people like Michael Albert. The firm would not offer benefits such as health care, retirement or other perks but would opt for a higher profit per partner instead. This is based on the assumption that intelligent individuals know best what to do with their earnings. Time off and work hours would be very flexible and based on current work-flow.
There would be a distinct effort to inspire firm morale through pro bono work and community involvement through projects like Lawyers Without Borders, Legal Aid and other worthy causes. The firm would vote on which projects to pursue and the quantity of resources to allot to these efforts.
Excellent Service
There would be an emphasis on keeping the firm customer-centric. Zappos would serve as an inspiration and measuring stick. E-commerce is clearly not the same as the legal world but putting clients first makes good business sense across seemingly disparate boundaries.
Our partners would be free of billable hour requirements. This would allow them to focus on providing the service that each client requires instead of meeting an arbitrary quota. Before the start of cases there would be a planning phase where clients would discuss their goals and where our team would plan a strategy to attain those goals through litigation. Obviously boundaries and reality checks would be in order but our focus would be on attaining the goals set forth in the preliminary meetings.
These tactics would hopefully lead to an upsurge in client referrals and repeat business. By outperforming our competitors in meeting expectation and keeping cost low through the methods discussed above our firm will begin to build a nice book of business.
Superior Usage of Technology
1. E-discovery Rather than shying away from large volumes of data we would embrace it. Using the outsourced solutions outlined above we’ll embrace ESI as a leveler. Culling the data aggrisively and lobbying hard for cost-sharing of the discovery cost will be an important factor to our success.
2. Social Sourced Solutions As a small firm, we’ll lack expertise on some important issues that other larger firms might have at their disposal. We’ll lean on an active online community to fill in the gaps. By leveraging social media like blogs, social networks and wikis our firm will attempt to find highly specialized knowledge where it lives online. It might be advantageous to eventually host this conversation via a lawyer-driven social site that we would maintain. This active community would be useful as a free repository of information, testing ground for tactics and a forum for public debate on unclear issues.
3. Collaborative and Enterprise Tools We would emphasize the utilization of free tools provided by companies like Google to share and communicate with clients and co-workers. As often as possible these tools should be open source and we would seek to improve them and share our work with the community. Partnering with other small out of market firms to work on open source document review software, VOIP systems and other DIY fixes would be a good start. We would lead a community movement and would use the social capital we accumulated through our pro bono and communal aid to resolve some of our technical issues at a reduced cost. The firm would offer to share our solutions with non-profits if we worked in tandem with these organizations to create useful legal tools.
Clients
Our ideal clients would be small to mid-sized start-up firms. In general, people like to do business with companies that are similar to their own. We’d strive to match their culture and values. The work we would do for them would be IP litigation, tech law and various other odds and ends. Our focus would be on being their de facto GC until they’re ready to grow beyond us. Eventually one might blossom into a Google or Facebook and in that case we would scale up to meet their needs.
We would never centralize too much risk in one client and would seek to keep our client list diversified and long. In addition to the traditional legal services we would offer there would be a selection of packages that clients could select. Some examples might be “Corporate Start-Up,” “Small Scale Litigation,” and so on. These projects would be farmed out to a pre-approved list of contract attorneys and be charged at a set rate. It would commoditize our less valuable services and provide an additional revenue stream.
