If you’ve got five minutes to spare, I commend you to join Adam Smith Esquire’s  Bruce MacEwen in a round of “Guess Which Firm’s Website?” As Bruce describes:
 The rules are simple: Pick three or four firms at random, visit their websites, and pretend you can’t see the logo identifying the firm. Try to guess which firm it is.
Bruce focused AmLaw100 websites that tout commitment to value and excellence, a collaborative and cost effective approach and other vague platitudes that don’t say much about what differentiates the firm or makes it the right choice for a particular client.  After much searching, Bruce found two website messages that he “particularly likes,” Proskauer Rose’s proposition that: So what do we bring to the table? Our approach is not simply to “represent” our clients but to get into their heads and Paul Weiss’  forty-year old promise by its founder “to achieve the highest order of excellence in the practice of the art, the science and the profession of the law.” Though I have no idea what it means to “get into a clients’ head” or whether it’s desirable (personally, it sounds a little new-agey and creepy to me), it does indeed stand apart from other bland copy.

Could you identify your website’s copy from the dozens of other sites online?  And if you could, what would it say? That you’re hard working and offer great client service (shouldn’t that be a given?) That you’re passionate (and is that necessarily a good thing; passion’s fleeting after all) or that your firm has XXX years of experience?  What makes your site different?

Following yesterday’s post exploring the viability of the $99/hour lawyer as a business model, discussion (if you can call an exchange of 140 character blurbs and bursts real discussion) ensued on Twitter. I wanted to use this post to summarize my view of the argument and also clarify the context of my post.

Defending People Mark Bennett criticized the $99/hour concept even for new lawyers (which is how I’d intended it), noting that his advice to new lawyers is that should try to be the type of lawyer they’d like to be 20 years down the line.  Once a cheap date, always a cheap date; hard to shake a reputation as a low priced lawyer, Mark argues.

Mark makes a good point – and one that I’ve noticed by real world analogy.  Recently, I’ve observed that once cheap stores like Target or Forever 21 (I’ve got teen daughters, OK?) where you can get tank top for four bucks or ten dollar jeans are introducing more expensive, faux high scale products to their low end line.  Although the products are still less costly than designer brands, it bugs me to pay more than $25 for anything at one of these stores because I assume that the quality is poor, and I expect the prices to be cheap.  I can see how the same thing can happen to lawyers who position themselves as cut rate $99/hour alternatives.

It wasn’t my intention to advocate this approach in my post, though I certainly see how it can be construed that way.  I floated the $99/hour option in a particular context; as an alternative to many of the “legal networks” arriving on the scene which encourage lawyers to bid for cases, or agree to take cases at severely capped fees in exchange for the “exposure” provided by a national network.  In this context, getting paid for all work done, even if it’s only $99/hour is preferable to doing a bankruptcy for $500 or drafting $100 wills.  In short, the $99/hour rate may be the lesser of two evils.

But as a stand alone business model, can $99/hour work?  In my post, I suggested that $99/hour could provide a living wage if overhead is low enough.  But as @jordanrushie aptly points out, you’d have to run a volume practice to make ends meet or else do lousy work on these cases because you wouldn’t have sufficient overhead to support yourself.  And as I’ve posted before, once you fall into the cycle of volume practice, it’s tough to escape.

Call it a new kind of legal limbo as law firms take a turn on the conga line to see just how low they can go.  Only this form of limbo isn’t a game, but serious business.  Large firms are quoting suicide rates to keep business reports Lawyerist while solos and nonlawyer networks are exploring cut prices potentially as a new business model.

Consider for example, Law99, a company that allows consumers to access legal services for $99 or less an hour, according to this press release.  Attorneys register to use the platform for $99/month and receive clients whom they’ve agreed to represent for $99 an hour or less thereby avoiding any fee splitting issues. There’s not much detail at the site on how long the lawyer must commit to a $99/hour arrangement and whether the commitment to keep rates below $99 an hour constitutes a contract with the lawyer, client or both (for example, if the lawyer raises rates or decides to charge a contingency, could Law99.com sue for breach of the terms of service?)  These are certainly issues I’d want to pin down before using the service.

In addition, I’d have some concerns about the types of lawyers signing up for Law99 and how that might impact myreputation.  It’s not exactly promising that the founder is quoted in a press release  as saying that lawyers will want to participate in Law99.com to supplement their current income or because they are broke and need clients.  Not sure that I’d want to be seen online in the company of the destitute and desperate, even if I fell into that category myself.

Still, Law99.com is a far better option than costly pay per click sites or those that force lawyers to handle for a miserly flat fee.  At $99/month, the cost to join Law99.com isn’t exorbitant (though it could still be better spent on personal networking or developing one’s own web presence) – and at $99/hour, lawyers won’t get rich but at least (in theory), they’ll be compensated for the time they put into the case. If you’re going to spend 40 hours on a DUI, you’re far better off being paid nearly $4000 than doing 40 hours of work for a flat fee of $1000.  

Last week, I attended the COLPM’s Futures Conference 2012 here in Washington D.C.  to learn where the practice of law and the legal profession are heading.  For once, I got more than I bargained for as panel after panel of technology experts and thought-leaders and in-house counsel openly shared the problems with today’s law firms, what today’s large clients expect and what law firms need to do different, or in the case of alternative providers and the Inno-vaction Award Winners already are doing differently.  

The panels weren’t limited to GCs and big law issues either; a panel on consumer law solutions featured virtual law practice pioneer Stephanie Kimbro who gave this presentation about online marketing tools (As an aside, the presentation is perhaps  mis-titled, because the point of the talk, at least for me, wasn’t about how lawyers can  hawk their wares but rather about how online technologies can expand consumers’ access to justice). And the panel also discussed some of the sophisticated automated tools now available to courts and legal aid organizations that enable them to churn out documents quickly so that the limited number of legal aid attorneys on staff can spend more time with clients.

But rather than leaving the conference invigorated, brimming with dozens of ideas on how to improve or expand my practice or better serve my clients, I departed with a sense of dread that I still can’t seem to shake. Because in between the talk of big law and corporate clients on the one hand and legal aid or non-legal providers on the other, where do solo and small law firms fit in?  The answer is — I’m not sure they do, at least in the long haul.  Here’s why – and more importantly, what we must do to avoid that fate.

Perhaps the most startling observation that I took away from the conference is that solos and smalls suffer from a technology gap.   Yes, I know that you’re probably thinking that I’ve gone mad – me, the same person who’s preached about how tech can level the playing field for solos and celebrated the advancements that make us more efficient.  Yet the problem with technology is that once the train leaves the station, it never again stands still. The same tech tools — Internet and cloud – that once gave solos an edge will crush us if we can’t keep pace (social media keeps its own category because it’s relationship based and therefore, has a bespoke quality that’s less fungible). 

True, many large law firms may be dinosaurs. But many still have cash to spend, particularly those that have shed associates and non-business generating partners.  They can afford to invest in unbelievably sophisticated, functional systems – like the Littler Mendelson CaseSmart™ system  that according to the description, “provides transparent, privileged, and real‐time online access to the status of the client’s legal matters, as well as a dashboard of key performance indicators, visual graphics, and reports.”  True, solos have law practice management portals and even simple document automation tools, but few have access to something this sophisticated. And while many solos would argue that this level of complexity isn’t necessary, those solos and small firms who target larger clients won’t be able to compete against larger firms that can offer clients the type of metrics that will allow them to pick up on patterns and improve operations in house. Moreover, when big data becomes a big deal for lawyers, firms can monetize that data by selling it, potentially generating another stream of revenue.

Last night, I glimpsed the future of work at my kitchen table.

It was 10 pm, and I’d just returned from the grocery store when I happened upon my daughter, math book and worksheet spread on the table, laptop  by her side open to a Facebook page.  Naturally, I exploded – “What are doing on…

When it comes to social media, many bar disciplinary bodies have expressed reservations about testimonials.  Some states permit lawyers to post testimonials on their websites only with prominent disclaimers, while others impose a duty on lawyers to monitor third-party sites like Avvo or LinkedIn where testimonials might crop up.

Though testimonials can potentially be deceptive…