Are law firms standing on a burning platform too?
Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 9:50PM Mashable's coverage of the internal memo (supposedly) circulated by Nokia's CEO makes interesting reading.
Reading him likening the company's position to that of a man standing on a burning oil platform it was hard not to think about law firms.
Mashable have the text of the entire memo. The message is maybe not quite as negative as the "burning platform" headline would have you believe, but what jumps out is the sense that Nokia buried its head in the sand and ignored the fires being lit all around it by Apple, Google and others as they set out about destroying its business model.
So, are law firms standing on a burning platform too?
Actually I think we have the good fortune to be where Nokia were in 2007 (around about when the first iPhones shipped).
The fires have been lit, and to borrow some lurid language from the Nokia memo:-
"we have more than one explosion – we have multiple points of scorching heat that are fuelling a blazing fire around us."*
but we still have the chance to recognise that fact and make the "radical change in behaviour" that it demands on our own terms.
This won't be the case forever though.
How many law firms will be standing on the edge of that burning platform in a few years' time looking at the "dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters" below and wondering, like Nokia, about the least painful way to jump?
*Make your own list, but the Legal Services Act, alternative business structures, the economy, legal process outsourcing, online service delivery to name just a few
Reader Comments (1)
Summary of a post which must have dissolved in the ether: I agree law firms will need to respond to the ABS environment. But a more fundamental problem, in my view, is the nature of our legal system. We seem bound to use out-dated language, which only lawyers can decipher. Listen to the outraged comments on standard terms' small print. And, because our system is basically adversarial, it is used as much as a shield by the bad guys as a sword by the good. Who hasn't seen the system being manipulated by the side with the weaker argument? What can the good lawyer do?