The Two Faces of The Law - Part I

By Chrissie Lightfoot 

Chrissie Lightfoot is CEO of EntrepreneurLawyer Limited where she advises professional service firms (and their individual people) globally on marketing, personal branding, sales, social media, social networking and innovation. The (London) Times newspaper recently reported Chrissie as one of the Top Ten Best Legal Tweeters. She is a non-practising solicitor, an entrepreneur, international keynote speaker and author, best noted for her groundbreaking book The Naked Lawyer: RIP to XXX – How to Market, Brand and Sell YOU!   

First published in Legal Futures on 1st September, 2011

With the plethora of reports and blog posts about online legal document and service providers, legal innovation, the law firm business model and the future of the legal profession, whizzing around cyberland of late it seems to me that we’re transitioning toward ‘two faces of the law’. The two dominant umbrella business models now at the fore, that allude who, what, where, why, when and how we serve our clients, are: Face to Face and Interface.

At a time of great change, it is the 'humanisation' of lawyers that I believe will be the key differentiator in the success of these models and their adopters. As we journey ahead into the future and Artificial Intelligence (AI) within legal provision and service becomes more advanced, and Singularity edges closer, 'humanisation', (that is, our ability to simply be human) will become even more important and valuable. 

 

Looking back, the month of August, has been one of revelations with the following developments having come to light:

• Rocket Lawyer has been backed by Google Ventures with a whopping $18.5million treasure chest. Rocket Lawyer provides legal documents for consumers and has a network of approximately 6,000 practising lawyers in the USA on hand to review forms created by its documentation system. It’s not a law firm and the lawyers involved are part of a referral network, not employees. It plans to  enter the UK legal market in 2012.
• LegalZoom, the best known legal brand in the USA, also founded by lawyers, had $66 million pumped into the business in the last few months. Again, not a law firm, LegalZoom provides legal documents created via its documentation system and checks are made by its customer care team, who amend errors such as spelling mistakes, capitalisation and so on. It will also be entering the UK online legal market in 2012.
• Aderant acquired Client Services and CompuLaw for an undisclosed sum. Aderant, a software vendor used by law firms for billing, content management, and practice management is now the legal technology field's largest independent software provider and its newly expanded applications catalogue is similar to that of LexisNexis, but without content and research services.
• Hewlett-Packard purchased Autonomy, a leading e-discovery provider, for a staggering $10 billion.
• Entrepreneur Ajaz Ahmed (the founder of Freeserve) has joined forces with Last Cawthra Feather (a UK Yorkshire law firm), to launch Legal365 (an online venture providing automated document assembly where lawyers will be on hand to help fill-out fixed fee legal documents the customer has purchased). It also plans to roll-out a UK national network of city centre law shops and Mr Ahmed has hinted that Legal365 could even become a franchise.
• Slater & Gordon, a leading Australian law firm and the world’s first to list on the Stock Exchange is eyeing up the UK legal market opportunities - It’s one of its business priorities for the coming year.

Here in the UK QualitySolicitors, has already got its business model up and running and Legal365 is not far behind, with a different model. Legal365’s business model is unlike that of QualitySolicitors (with its WHSmith Legal Access Points) in that it offers on-the-spot advice, rather than arranging appointments at an alternate location.

So…. the Americans are coming, the Aussies are coming, the techy geeks are coming, theentrepreneurs are coming...  and the disruptors will be here to stay and to agitate....

(To be continued.....)

 

Chrissie Lightfoot

The Entrepreneur Lawyer
(of the naked kind)
Author of The Naked Lawyer: RIP to XXX – How To Market, Brand & Sell YOU!