Finding the right lawyer in terms of experience, expertise, location and availability is often difficult, even in a US market of 740,000 private practice lawyers. The market is large and fragmented. Specific purchase decision information to make such assessments is largely unavailable.
A well thought-out Internet venture could assemble the requisite information about private practice lawyer credentials and match that with an easy to use search engine to create an interactive means to locate qualified lawyers. Using the Internet's 24/7 availability means that such searches can occur at anytime from anywhere in the world, rather than solely during "regular business hours".
Lawyers are currently constrained in the amount of time they can devote to building effective relationships and networks and the extent they can advertise or otherwise promote their credentials. The Internet, in the form of law firm web sites, mitigates those constraints and has been largely embraced by the legal profession. First uses by law firms were the electronic versions of firm brochures that were placed on the Internet. Second and third generation web sites added more sophistication and communication elements to these efforts. While these sites are useful, they generally lack hard-edged information that purchasers seek.
Clearly, lawyer marketing is expensive and time consuming. Today's firms employ non-lawyer staff to assist in this task, but lawyer time requirements have continued to increase. Marketing materials, advertising, white papers and other traditional efforts consume resources. Presentations such as "beauty pageants" and other types of pitching efforts escalate. If the Internet is successful at reducing the need for those activities, it is successful in reducing both cost and time for the lawyers. This improves profitability and allows additional lawyer time to be focused on direct client service.
Again, an Internet venture can offer a means to centralize, and even authenticate, vital credential information so that it can be efficiently searched. The marketing types would say this provides an enhanced marketing and distribution channel to potential clients, based on more comprehensive and objective performance criteria.
Once potentially qualified lawyers are found, the Internet venture could provide an easy means to begin to learn more about these pre-screened lawyers. Video streaming and video conferencing are two tools that will eventually become pervasive. Because of their rich interactive capability, the potential client can get a much better sense of who the lawyer is, without the need of a "live" meeting. Add web conferencing and you have tools that allow immediate and superbly interactive opportunities for buyers, such as corporate counsel, to communicate with potential lawyers.
Selection of a lawyer will undoubtedly require some negotiation of certain parameters between the parties. The Internet provides a medium where you can, in an organized way, engage in a multi-parametric negotiation with a short list of qualified and interested lawyers. While some would immediately say, "Aha! That is bidding!", in reality it is conceptually no different than the competitive presentations and negotiations that take place everyday in a paper driven environment. All the Internet does is provide a forum where, if properly controlled to ensure a fair and open setting, that activity can occur faster and at lower cost to all participants. Thus the market becomes more competitive, but in an objective and reliable way not generally available to the legal profession to date.
Once the marketplace becomes populated (critical mass established with lawyer information and buyers actively using the forum to search and interact with lawyers), a true market is established. At that point, corporate counsel could assemble portfolios of current or future work and offer those portfolios to pre-screened lawyers more effectively than they do today. The lawyers can respond as to whether they can undertake part or all of the work. Both buyer and seller benefit from the efficiencies such transactions can generate.
When lawyers have an opportunity to compete for portfolios of work, it provides them with something they have always sought: the ability to rationally plan the resources they will need to service work in the future. In addition, if a law firm finds itself with excess capacity, it is in a better position, by using the Internet, to market and deploy those resources rather than have them remain idle.
After selection, the Internet then becomes an excellent medium to allow the parties to collaborate as the work is performed. Such collaboration could best be handled with the Internet venture offering a practice management interface accessible by both buyer and seller with modules for budgeting, strategy, monitoring, reporting, timekeeping, billing and the myriad of other activities that take place as the services are delivered.
The Internet is a powerful tool that offers immediate benefits to all who are willing to explore new ways of conducting business. As with anything new, some trial and error should be expected. The advantage of getting in early is that the early movers are the most influential in shaping how the new medium will work.
James D. Cotterman is a senior consultant with Altman Weil, Inc., which provides management, marketing and technical consulting services to legal organizations throughout the US, Canada and elsewhere in the world. The firm is based in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, and has offices in the US and UK.