The similarities between publishing and legal industries have already been widely commented on. Publishers of all kinds are at a crossroads, and are busy experimenting with business models.

Today News International unveiled their new web designs for The Times and Sunday Times, prior to them disappearing behind a paywall later this year. Murdoch is banking that a traditional subscription business model will work in the internet age.

Meanwhile Guardian Media Group has launched its Open Platform – the complete opposite of the Times approach. The Guardian and Observer are providing their content for developers to reuse and repurpose in whatever applications they want. Some types of reuse are free, others require registration and licensing or revenue sharing. Just to be clear – that means The Guardian will pay you to republish their content!

The Times wants to wall its content off from the rest of the internet. The Guardian wants to see its content (re)used as widely as possible.

Which model will work?

In an age where information is a commodity you need three things to operate a paywall: unique content, great reputation and niche, targeted information from which readers can derive value. That’s real value as-in money saved, or money earned. That’s why the Financial Times can operate a paywall, as can Tessa Shepperson. But the Times? I’m sceptical.

The Guardian on the other hand is embracing the idea of a sell-through business model where revenues are shared with distribution partners. This is a proven internet business model similar to the Amazon Affiliate and Google Adsense programmes that helped cement both of them as dominant players in their markets. I am certain this will lead to The Guardian having more online readers than The Times. Could it lead them to a dominant position?

What can we learn for the future of the legal profession?

Two very different approaches. One embracing all the opportunity (and risks) of the new technology, and one betting that old models still work. Which one wins will likely provide an interesting thesis for MBA students in the future, and an interesting reference for law firms.

My take?

• If you are a large national firm, your objective should be to commoditize legal information. Give it away for free, share it as widely as you can, and use the mind-share you gain to sell services. Real services that provide real value.
• If you are a small firm of solicitors, work to build your brand as an expert, then figure out how you can provide a subscription service that provides real value to the fans you have gained.
• If you are a midsize regional law firm, you’d better decide which way to jump, because the average middle will be squeezed.

What do you think? Am I wrong? And what do you think it means for the legal profession… if anything?

‘It’s almost impossible as a consumer to be able to differentiate one law firm from another. I can’t tell you the number of websites I’ve looked at which describe the firm as “modern with traditional values, forward-thinking with a focus on customer service…” .’ That sort of stock phase was ‘repeated ad infinitum’. ‘If you’re a member of the public it’s almost impossible to choose between firms and that is why they start thinking: “If I can’t tell the difference, I might as well just get the cheapest.”’

Craig Holt – QualitySolicitors.com, The Big Bang Report.

How can solicitors stand out from the crowd to build a distinctive and thriving business? In this first post of a series I am going to look at opportunities for law firms to create a distinctive niche for themselves, so that they can compete effectively in the post Legal Services Act market.

Opportunity #1: Speed

Countless of successful businesses have been built on the premise of doing things more quickly than the competition:

• DHL took international parcel delivery and guaranteed next day delivery
• Snappy Snaps took photo processing from days to hours
• Kwik Fit built a brand out of being fastest for tyre changes

The nice thing about all these is that time pressed customers will typically pay a premium for rapid service. If I were a law firm I might be thinking about offering 30-minute wills, 15-minute lunchtime speed appointments, and for businesses, maybe things like contract reviews with guaranteed same-day turnaround.

What do you think?

How will the legal services market look in 10 years time?

I’m placing my bets now:

• Four or five big players dominating the retail market. Some will have a high street presence. Some will be virtual-only operations, serving clients via the Internet and telephone. Most will provide 24-hour service, and there will be an almost exclusive focus on legal products, as opposed to one-to-one consultation and hourly billing used primarily today. There will be a huge range of products at varying price points to suit every pocket.
• The middle market will be decimated. The midsize, generalist, regional law firms of today will be hit savagely. Most if not all will be gone. Any that do survive will be struggling along, fighting for a diminishing client base of OAPs and technological refusniks.
• A booming market of boutique law firms – niche players that have found an area in which they can become ‘famous’ as experts, or areas of law too small, or too risky (from a brand and image point of view) that will make the big players avoid them. Some smart firms are starting to head down this path today. Lots more will spring up as many laid-off ex-middle market lawyers use redundancy payments to start their own boutique firm.

Do you agree? One thing is for sure – the future will not be boring!

Who will save book publishing?

What will save the newspapers?

What means ’save’?

If by save you mean, "what will keep things just as they are?" then the answer is nothing will. It’s over.

We need to get past this idea of saving, because the status quo is leaving the building, and quickly. Not just in print of course, but in your industry too.

This recent Seth Godin’s post struck me in sharp contrast to the Legal IT Show last week. where the mood seemed to be ‘if we ignore the Legal Services Act, maybe it won’t happen’. Indeed at least a couple of people I spoke to seemed to be pinning their hopes on a future Conservative government changing the legislation. Really? Since when have the Tories been in favour of less competition and against free markets?

The similarities between legal and publishing industries have been pointed out before. The publishing industry is in disarray. But law firms have an advantage… they can look back at what has happened to the publishing industry, and learn from their mistakes.

The reality is that the Legal Services Act is coming. More competition is coming. And there will be both winners and losers.

Seth finishes his post:

Every revolution destroys the average middle first and most savagely.

How will you avoid being average? What can you learn from the publishing industry? How will you make sure your firm is a winner?

Just a quick observation from Friday’s conference call How UK Lawyers are Using Social Media. If I remember correctly, there wasn’t a single mention of policies, procedures or rules.

Not one.

Interesting.

Adrian Dayton (@adriandayton) hosted a conference call today with the UK’s two most prolific legal Twitter users, Brian Inkster (@brianinkster) and Chris Sherliker (@London_Law_Firm). Also on the call was social media marketer Rory Webber (@MrRX).

These are our notes. Enjoy…

Making Connections… Building Relationships

Chris: Twitter is a process in which you engage… It’s about building relationships… We have found clients from Twitter including a major client who then went on to became a supplier… They then also referred us to a large telecoms client

Adrian: It’s a giant cocktail party, and it requires you to step into the circle to engage

Brian: We haven’t received any direct client work, but I have been interviewed by the press several times as a result of being on Twitter, including today… Was interviewed by The Metro on topic of social media and property. This of course can raise the profile of the law firm, and it’s not impossible that tomorrow we could get enquiries after people read the Metro article

Adrian: Twitter is about instant real-time conversation… You can join any conversation internationally and make international connections

Chris: Our firm is active in the USA, but not Turkey, and through Twitter we have met @turkish_lawyer, got to know him, and as a consequence have referred work to him and received referrals from him

Adrian: This is the death of the cold call… There’s no reason to make them any more… You can build relationships first

Making Time for Twitter

Brian: It is called social media. I tend to do it in the evening or first thing in morning.

Chris: It fit it into my normal routine… 95% of tweets are from my iPhone… e.g. while waiting for taxi. It makes use of moments where I wouldn’t be able to do much else

What About ROI?

Chris: I think of Twitter as a way of finding people to provide services to, and people to provide services to me… It’s a very time efficient way to sell. We have benefited from that, but equally have met people who have since provided professional development services to our firm, and people who are building our blogs

Brian: Taking the relationship outside of Twitter is what really brings the benefits… But don’t forget it’s fun… It’s social media.. . It’s fun for me… If business comes out of it, great, but that’s not the key priority

Chris: When people talk ROI, one of the things they should also remember is that Twitter is completely free. And that effectively I have had something like 7,000 free adverts. The only investment you have to make is time and you don’t have to spend ages in Twitter

Adrian: I find it useful to organise meetings through Twitter ahead of conferences… So I have a jump start on other people attending

Getting the Mix Right

Adrian: Twitter is a great way to meet other fascinating people… But the perception in the US is that UK lawyers are more serious…

Brian: Not a huge number of UK lawyers using Twitter yet, and between those on the call, we probably know all of them. Firm accounts don’t work in the same way as personal ones, and you really need individuals or groups of individuals to make the interaction work on Twitter

Chris: I send out a mix of tweets from serious legal matters to how to make the perfect cocktail… and that seems to work well for me

Brian: We originally started with a company Twitter account, but switched to personal account… Going back to the cocktail party analogy, I realised you need to be a person to go to a cocktail party

Adrian: No one wants to hire a law firm; they want to hire a person they like

Getting Started

Chris: When you first register, it asks you the question what are you doing right now? I quickly realised no-one wants to know. People are more interested in getting to know people. There is a marketing adage that people only buy from people the know, like and trust. Otherwise they are not going to instruct you.

Rory:  People need to get connected then listen and learn. In the modern age listening is reading, and speaking is writing… When you first join you should spend more time listening than speaking… When I first joined Twitter i spent first couple of weeks ‘listening’ before joining the conversation

Chris: It takes a while to convince others to use social media. When I first started everyone thought I was mad. Now we have four partners using Twitter in the company

Adrian: It’s important to find right champions in your firm. Companies often leave it to juniors, and this isn’t always the right thing to do. Chris is using the tools better than many younger professionals… You need more experienced attorneys that add value… It’s about growing relationships and then taking them to the next level such as lunch or coffee

What Does the Future Hold?

Chris: With the upcoming Legal Services Act, and hence non-lawyers and institutions coming in, lawyers will need to use these tools to get work from elsewhere… It takes a while to build up followers so they had better get moving

Rory: Agreed. Growing competition means that people need to get involved

Footnote

These are our notes from the call, and focus on the things that grabbed our attention. Leave a comment below if there is something important you feel we missed.

And finally, Adrian has promised to make a recording available for on-demand playback for anyone that want to listen to the whole call.  Keep checking his website for that.

This morning saw another couple of inches of snow dumped on us here in North Hampshire and an accident shut the main route into Reading.

According to The Times the cost to the economy in lost productivity is set to reach £2bn.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Simple low cost technology and modern working practices make it easy for employees of professional service companies to work from anywhere.

Here’s how we beat the snow and kept working as normal last week:

• Staff get laptops, not desktop PCs as standard enabling them to work from home, client site… anywhere
• Email accounts are accessible via browser, Blackberry, iPhone and of course Outlook from your laptop
• Project documents are stored centrally in SharePoint and accessible anywhere you have an Internet connection
• IM worked as a replacement for those ad-hoc office conversations: “Hey, can you remember where the expenses form is…?”
• Meetings became web conferences complete with video and document sharing

It used to be that only the biggest FTSE-100 companies could afford this type of technology, but Cloud Computing now means that the cost has fallen drastically and it is now no longer about how big you are, but how agile you are.

Maybe the weather is a blessing and maybe, just maybe, things could be about to change…

How should solicitors and law firms compete with the availability of free legal information on the web? How might it impact current business models?

In the IT industry, we have been grappling with this issue for a number of years… lots and lots of free information and advice on the Web, free open source software, and many, many free websites. Observations from the IT industry are that traditional paid-for software providers are still doing very well. The radical change that we thought open source software would bring hasn’t been as radical as we originally thought, and there are still plenty of well-paid jobs for IT consultants. Free open-source alternatives now with co-exist paid-for products and to varying degrees are embraced by the likes of IBM, Sun and even Microsoft.

Lessons for the legal sector (and indeed any professional service firms)

• Get close to your clients. Understand their business and become their trusted partner. Show you provide real value. Good consulting fees will remain for people who can do this well
• Look at low value-add services that you provide. These could easily become cannibalised and commoditized by free alternatives. Consider acting first and making them free before your competitors do (the Sun Open Office approach). Alternatively look at what else you can add to make your offering unique and worth paying for (the Microsoft Office approach)
• Look how you can use free products and build on top of them to lower your product/service costs
• Think about how it is possible to create packaged product offerings that can effectively compete with free, rather than simply an hourly service
• Think how you can create and distribute free offerings yourselves to introduce people to your brand (And perhaps if a free product is one step to far right now, you could consider starting by using free tools to help in your marketing)
• Consider getting involved and contributing to free information forums in order to build your brand recognition and reputation.  The idea is essentially to build credibility, trust and brand recognition so that when people do need to purchase legal services, they will think to come to you