Earlier this month (April 2017) LexisNexis published the latest in its series of legal market reports. Titled ‘Amplifying the voice of the client in law firms‘ and edited by the brilliant Mark Smith (no relation), this latest report from LexisNexis purports to identify specific areas of disconnect between UK top-50 law firms and their clients, by means of seeking answers from both sides of the equation to the following three questions:

1. What are the points of disconnect between the client and the law firm?
2. Why does the disconnect occur?
3. What can law firms and their clients do to reduce the disconnect?

Among the report’s many interesting findings, the one that really stands out for me was the view of most in-house lawyers that, for the most part, solutions need only be “good enough”; provided they are delivered timely, and in a format that enables the in-house lawyer to make decisions quickly. But that, for the most part, in-house lawyers were not getting this service with most saying they received good legal diagnoses but very little by way of commercial solutions.

The findings here are reflective of what I heard Ann Klee, VP of Global Operations — Environment, Health & Safety, at General Electric Company say at a Big Law Business Summit in August 2015 – in describing how (in part) GE managed to reduce its outside legal spend by $60 million in a year – when she mentioned that the bottom line is that the role of a lawyer today is about managing more risk, it’s not about just being asked to do more for less, it’s being asked to do less with less.

So we are being told – by the clients themselves, from both sides of the Atlantic, that they do not need “gold standard” legal advisory services, but rather are not only happy to receive “good enough” advice, but would prefer it that way if the advice that was given was commercially applicable to them and provided in a timely manner (on this issue, see my recent post on ‘responsiveness‘).

And yet I have never seen any marketing or tender material produced by a law firm outside of the top tier in any country that says anything along the lines of “we are the good enough lawyers“. Conversely, I have seen more marketing material than any sane person should by mid-tier firms to the effect that “we provide top-tier gold standard legal advisory services at mid-tier [cheap] prices” – a service clients are repeatedly saying loud and clear that they don’t want.

To my mind, all of this adds up to be a massive billion dollar opportunity going to waste by any mid-tier law firm who would be happy saying to their clients (and, importantly, the clients of top-tier firms) “we’re the ‘good enough’ firm that will get you across the line at a fraction of the fee!“.

And I genuinely believe that the first firm that gets this – be it by unbundling, clause light reviews, collaborative teams, innovation, technology, knowledge sharing platforms, or a cross section of all and every, will make a motza!  

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