Rob Millard provides a valuable lesson in how innovation in law firms progresses. Steam, Electricity and Law Firm Management is definitely worth a read and I was struck by this insight:
The Chairman of a very prominent national US law firm mentioned in a conversation that we were having recently that except for the computers, there is little difference in a law office today, to what existed 50 years ago. The arrangement of offices, structural hierarchies and suchlike are still “just as they always have been.” Other practices like hourly billing and aversion to alternative work arrangements would fall into the same category. This is more than just generational differences in perception between Baby Boomers / Gen Xs / Gen Ys. The changes that people talk about today are challenging the very foundation of the way in which legal services are being provided to clients.
The good news is that just as electricity was around for 40+ years before it was fully adopted, so many of the solutions to the problems facing law firms today are also out there, in plain sight, in the market. The challenge is not so much in finding the solution, as in overcoming the corporate inertia of the firm’s business model, to get those solutions implemented.
Billing by the hour a problem? Fine … replace it with value pricing or risk sharing models. But how does one actually do that with the same ease as filling in time sheets? (My view on the billable hour is that it is an excellent example of something that will eventually go the way of the dodo, but first the "factories need to be reinvented.")
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