The Two Faces of The Law - Part II

(Continued...)

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!   

The new legal marketplace 

Clearly, the transformation and arguably the re-invention of legal service provision,  is well and truly underway. As legal commentator Jordan Furlong puts it, "we’ve begun crossing over from the old legal marketplace to the new one."

In reading Jordan’s thought provoking ‘Goodbye to all that’  blog post, there were three statements that really struck me:

"The new providers and new technologies are not going to replace lawyers... but they are going to marginalize us and render law firms mostly irrelevant".

"Lawyers still have outstanding value to offer in certain quarters, but we need to concentrate our market offerings around that value, and we need better platforms for our services than traditional law firms provide."

"Lawyers are smart, knowledgeable, creative and trustworthy professionals who, unfortunately, suffer from poor business acumen, terrible management skills, wildly disproportionate aversion to risk, outsized revenue expectations, and a business model about 25 years out of date. The market won’t abandon them — they have unique and sometimes extraordinarily valuable skills and characteristics — but it will find the best use for them: expert specialists with limited influence over the larger process."

I agree.  As we lawyers become marginalized, our role and value - both Face to Face and at the Interface - will be in extolling our expert niche specialism with exceptional emotional intelligence whilst delivering extraordinary customer service (humanisation – naked – something AI and computers will never be... or will they?).

The franchise model

I wonder when somebody, a non-lawyer, will come up with the idea (and act on it) of rolling out a legal franchise from scratch welcoming and supporting frustrated entrepreneurial lawyers, who are looking to capitalize on this transformation, re-invent themselves and start up their own ‘business of law’ with all of the usual trappings and trimmings associated with the benefits of being a franchisee.  The franchise business model has stood the test of time in the business world. It’s a proven model which works so perhaps it could work for the new legal world, couldn't it?

Imagine a legal business model for the franchisee where there are no existing law firms already at ‘the coal face’ , with potential conflict where uniform brand, values, quality, outdated fee structures and legacy systems, policies and governance would be an issue. Wouldn’t it be a marvellous opportunity for a franchisor, attractive for the entrepreneurial lawyer franchisee and great for the customer if uniformity of brand, values, quality and extraordinary customer service was available and achievable, by combining a joined up Face to Face relationship building approach whilst embracing online document technology, at the Interface?

It appears that face2face solicitors has done exactly that.  As the first national franchise for lawyers and/or law firms, face2face solicitors is the brainchild of a team of  business experts who have provided strategic planning advice to business professionals for many years.

After having studied their website, my curiosity actually led me to pick up the phone and ask them a few probing questions.  I don’t usually make such an overt plug in favour of a particular business model but I’m tempted to with this one because I can see the mega attraction for both lawyers and customers during this transitional period.

What attractions do I see? Watch this space, Part III coming soon...

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