Legal Commentary

Jeff's Carr's Four Buckets-- Advocacy, Counseling, Process and Content--And Change In The Legal Profession

By Patrick J. Lamb

Jeff Carr, the General Counsel of FMC Technologies and ACC Board Member, has spoken often about his idea that legal services fit into four buckets, two of which he is happy to pay for and two of which he thinks will someday be free.  Jeff says he happily will pay for advocacy and counseling, which require skill, expertise, knowledge of the company and which are, at their core, customized services.  The other two buckets are process and content.  Jeff sees these kinds of products as ultimately being provided for free or at very minimal cost on the web.

I know that some people have questioned this vision.  But a new post in The Adventures of Strategy by Rob Millard or the renowned Edge International consulting group suggests Jeff's vision is here, or at least on the not-too-distant horizon.  Rob's post, The inexorability of commoditization, describes Wilson Sonsini's launch of a web-based Term Sheet Generator for venture financing for free.  The story also is described by Ross Hollman, in Strategize, who discusses the "why" question:

Why would Wilson Sonsini do this? It's not really costing them anything -- by their own admission, it is a web-based, generic version of a tool that they already use in-house. Maybe the end result will work for some venture money, but my guess is that there's enough that's generic that you may need to call Wilson Sonsini for advice and/or customization: give away the artifact (i.e., the term sheet) and make your money on the resultant service. Will some other attorneys use this and charge their clients for it? Probably. But my guess is that Wilson Sonsini is not after the clients that would go to those types of attorneys.

Rob Millard then makes the point Jeff Carr has been preaching:

Ross and others preaching a similar message including Mark Chandler (general counsel of CISCO,) and Richard Susskind (author of 'The End of Lawyers') are dead right: the days of selling knowledge or standardized templates by the hour are almost gone forever. In the (near) future, information and "artifacts" (I love that term ... ) will be freely available in the market. Professionals will only make money where they need to apply deep expertise and judgment to their clients' specific businesses in ways that yield high value. For this, they will be able to charge superior rates not only because of the high value to the client, but because such deep expertise and judgment will remain rare in the market given the effort required to acquire it and remain up to date. For those relying on less sophisticated services, the price race is on .... all the way down to zero.

Given the paradigm shift now underway courtesy of a troubled economy, I wonder how many law firm leaders will think about this issue.  I wonder how many will actually frame their plans around this idea.

Full post as published by In Search of Perfect Client Service on April 27, 2009 (boomark / email).