Law firm epidemiology

If I had to make a prediction for 2011, I would say that social media use by law firms will continue to rise.

I'm sure that the ever increasing number of social media consultants, gurus and "ninjas" (yes seriously) will convince law firms that social media is the free and easy way to take their marketing to the next level. Somewhere in these pitch meetings the fateful word will almost certainly crop up:- "viral".

An interesting question to ask at this stage is when you last remember a story about a law firm "going viral"? It's difficult to define this, but fairly easy to spot in action - I follow a 1,000 or so people on Twitter and any story which really takes off will be tweeted and re-tweeted into my timeline to the point where it is difficult to miss.

There have been some. The infamous Claire Swire email is a good, if rather elderly, example (although that was in the days when the sharing was done mainly by email).

More recently the law firm stories which have created a buzz on Twitter have been more along the lines of the ACS:Law data leak and the coverage of Carter Ruck's attempt to use a super-injunction to block Parliamentary debate on the Trafigura affair.

You can argue that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but these aren't really the kind of stories which many firms would deliberately include in their social media strategy.

When was the last time you saw a positive story about a law firm (or any story which they were promoting themselves) gain any real traction on Twitter beyond a relatively small legal interest group? This isn't a rhetorical question - if any spring to mind then let me know.

The reality is that the stories which really do "go viral" are those which capture the public imagination... and this is rarely for reasons which the firm involved would like.

Embarrassing stories about oral sex? Allegations about infringements of civil liberties? These are the kind of stories people will read and re-tweet. The opening of your new office in Bracknell? Not so much.

You don't drive the social media agenda. A story is either interesting or it isn't and social media doesn't change that one iota. Unfortunately, the vast majority of law firm stories just aren't.

If anyone suggests that your press releases are somehow going to "go viral" because they are released using social media then it is time to end the meeting. They don't know what they are talking about.

Are there exceptions? There always are, but a good example is the infamous Ditch the Bitch campaign by Brookman solicitors featuring posters in the mens' (and ladies') washrooms of City bars. Classy? Probably not. Offensive? Possibly. Unfortunately in 2001 it was ahead of its time so far as social media is concerned, but today I'm pretty sure it would be all over Twitter.

The question is, how many law firms are really prepared to do something like this?

Lawyers, boats and paywalls

The news this week has been all about how the Times lost 90% of its online readership by implementing a paywall arrangement for access to its site (see for example the Guardian coverage).

There is some debate about whether this figure is good or bad (personally I imagine it was close to what they were expecting), but it has certainly gained a lot of attention.

Leaving aside all this excitement though, I have come across another area this week where paywalls seem to be quietly thriving - the world of boat reviews.

This requires a bit of illustration. Imagine you want to buy a sailing boat and you see a notice at the sailing club offering a Westerly Nimrod for sale at a suitable price.

You haven't heard of this class of boat, but a Google search suggests it could be right for you. You find a few pictures, a bit of history from the Westerly Owners Association and a couple of blogs, but not much detailed information. After all, there are a lot of classes of boats and many aren't covered in detail on the web.

What you need to know is how this type of boat sails, how it compares to the competition, what kind of price you should expect to pay and whether there are any particular problems to look out for.

Someone who owns one could give you some advice, but how do you know if this is accurate or objective. Everyone tends to look at their own boat with a particular fondness - and maybe he has never sailed anything else!

Suddenly, an objective review of the boat is actually quite valuable to you... and it may be available. At a price.

There are quite a few sailing magazines published in the UK which review new and used boats each month.

Many of them now offer downloads of their old reviews. These are expensive even compared to the Times paywall (£6 for a 4-page review), but if you are deciding whether to spend £2,000 (or £200,000!) on a new yacht then it may make sense to pay.

In fact, Practical Boat Owner reviewed the Westerly Nimrod in 2000 and you can buy the review online in PDF format for £6.95. In this situation (which is hypothetical - just in case my wife is reading this and getting worried) I probably would.

Of course, this is a great example of Chris Anderson's Long Tail effect. Rather than stocking back issues of magazines in a warehouse, it now costs the publishers very little to offer all their old boat reviews for instant access online.

It doesn't really matter if I am the only person to buy the review this year as the marginal cost of hosting each review is close to zero and I have paid more than the cost of a whole issue of the magazine just to read these four pages. Of course, this is all about the timing - a month ago I would never have dreamed of paying £1.50 a page for this, but "right here and now" it is good value for me.

So what has this go to do with lawyers?

Well, in my view, there is an easy comparison with the rise of free (or very low cost) legal services on the internet.

Buying a boat is an important decision which can be very expensive if it isn't done properly. So are making a will, drafting terms and conditions for your business or getting divorced (to take just a few examples).

In the same way I can find information on the boat online (reading blogs and websites, joining forums and asking existing owners) I could pull together my own business terms and conditions or find out about making a will or getting divorced using free resources.

There is a DIY option in both situations, but it may well be time consuming and there is no guarantee that it will give me an objective, expert answer which will suit my requirements.

In the case of the boat, what I am really buying with my £6.95 is an objective opinion from an expert who has sailed a lot of different boats and can compare it to the alternatives available. I also get professional photographs and a good steer on what I should be paying and what to look out for. Finally, I get it instantly when I enter my credit card details.

The position with the lawyer is (or should be!) the same. The basic legal resources are available on a "DIY" basis, but what you are really paying for is the judgement and expertise of someone who is acting in your best interests and can apply this to your own individual circumstances.

This has always been the case, but maybe the internet is actually a great opportunity to offer this to clients quickly and conveniently - in the "right here and now" when they need it?

Sailing magazines obviously figured this out a long time before the Times paywall was even conceived... maybe it is time for more lawyers to do the same?

The iPad Lawyer - Documents to Go

Developments on the iPad front are coming thick and fast... whilst I was writing yesterday's post about editing legal documents on the iPad it turns out that DataViz were launching a new version of their Documents To Go software which now works on the iPad.

Documents To Go has been available on the iPhone for a while, but the iPad release goes a long way towards addressing the concerns I have previously raised about using the iPad to edit legal documents.

The download is priced at £6.99 in the UK (continuing the trend of iPad apps being vastly more expensive than their iPhone counterparts). I have bought and installed the App and in my view it is well worth the price. You can either transfer documents across and work on them in the same way as any other App - or download the desktop version of Documents To Go which apparently allows you to keep the documents in sync between the desktop and the iPad (I haven't tested this yet).

A couple of screenshots show how big a leap this is (click on the images for the full sized versions which are more readable). The first one shows a typical legal document which I have imported from MS Word format into Pages on the iPad:-

You can see that the formatting is all over the place, the numbering has gone haywire and it generally looks a complete mess. Rest assured that if you export it back into Word or email it to someone the end result won't look any better.

Here is the same document imported into Documents To Go.

It basically looks exactly the same as on my desktop... and when edited and exported back it still looks exactly the same with all the underlying formatting and numbering intact.

I still wouldn't want to draft a share purchase agreement on the iPad, but this opens to door to using it to edit documents whilst I am on the road in a way which wasn't possible at the beginning of the week.

There is still one problem... even Documents To Go can't handle documents with tracked changes (as Josh at Tablet Legal has previously noted).

A lot of firms prefer to use proprietary comparison software rather than the Microsoft tracked changes system so this may not be a dealbreaker for everyone, but it is still a bit limiting.

However, based on previous performance I will probably find that by the time I post this someone will have released an App to do it!

Update on Wednesday, June 2, 2010 at 1:50PM by Peninsulawyer

Update:- I have also testing the integration between Documents To Go and Dropbox and it works really nicely. Simply connect the App with your Dropbox account and you can work on documents and save the revisions back to your Dropbox (which doesn't seem to work with Pages and other Apps).

The only thing to note is that you have to exit the document once you have saved it any sync your Dropbox before it will show up.

The Documents To Go desktop method of transfer seems to require you to be connected via the same WiFi network so I don't know how useful this will be for me in the office, but the Dropbox functionality seems to cover what I need.

The $60 courtesy email

A hat tip to @lawyergina and @lichtermanlaw for tweeting about a fascinating post by Jennifer Walzer on the NY Times You're the boss blog.

How do Lawyers get away with this stuff? records Jennifer's experience as the client of a lawyer she engaged to review her company's lease of a new office.

You need to read the full post, but suffice to say that it covers most of the worries which people have about using a lawyer... open ended costs, poor communication and arrogance. My personal favourite is the $60 charge for an (unnecessary) courtesy response to a simple email she sent explaining that she was out of the office for the day.

How do lawyers get away this stuff? My view is that they probably won't for much longer (and to be fair, whilst I don't know the position in the US, they really couldn't get away with this over here at the moment without falling foul of the Solicitors Regulation Authority).

As @lichtermanlaw commented on Twitter:

Why do we only do fees on a flat-fee basis, agreed to in advance? [Because this is] the alternative

A really useful read for anyone thinking of instructing a lawyer... and a reminder to make sure that they give you their charging structure and fees up front!

Competency tests?

I have been following the debate in the Law Society Gazette over recent weeks about the inability of solicitors to work to a fixed fee because their counterpart on the other side of a transaction may be incompetent or inexperienced.

This seems to have struck a nerve with the profession (see the letters from Natalie Saunders from Berwins entitled "Time-based charging cannot be abandoned entirely" and from Neil Wright entitled "Competency Test" by way of example and the in-house counsel perspective from Christopher Digby-Bell).

Christopher used the analogy of a heart surgeon to illustrate the concept that payment should be based on results and not necessarily the time spent, which was challenged by a subsequent correspondent who replied  that longer heart operations cost more (see the full letter of response here).

This seems like a rather strange argument - as Christopher pointed out in his own response, it is unquestionably true that the operation will cost more (in terms of  theatre time and staff costs) but actually the surgeon doesn't charge the patient more  in this situation.

I don't disagree that often the biggest problem on a transaction is dealing with a solicitor representing the other party who clearly has no experience or knowledge of the relevant area of law. It can and does make matters much more difficult and time consuming.

As a profession though can we seriously afford to say to our clients "we can't guarantee that other members of the profession are qualified or competent to carry out the work they take on. If it turns out that this is the case here, then we will expect you to pay extra for it"?

As a client, if a lawyer said this to me I would find another lawyer - and there are plenty around who will offer a fixed fee.

Maybe the answer is in competency tests for specific practice areas as Neil suggests? This is the position in other professions such as medicine - to strain the heart surgeon analogy even further your heart surgeon wouldn't be able to decide that he was a little short of work and so would try his hand at a few knee replacements.

Some practice areas do seem to have adopted this idea of additional qualification (for example the Society of Trusts and Estate Practitioners which offers the various STEP certificates and diplomas for practitioners in this area), but it could be used more widely.

I don't believe that the answer lies is in arguing with our clients (and that includes in-house counsel) when they tell us that they want fixed fees and are not prepared to subsidise the incompetence of other solicitors.

To (loosely) paraphrase Bill Gates:-

"in 10 years the way in which solicitors operate today will be obsolete. The only question is whether we make it obsolete or whether someone else will"

If we, as a profession, refuse to listen to what our clients are telling us then it will be someone else who makes it obsolete.