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Of Challenge and Opportunity

For years, lawyers and clients talked about alternatives to traditional hourly billing arrangements, yet little changed.  The financial crisis increased pressure on corporate legal departments to reduce the legal spend, and has led some of them to push for new ways of pricing legal services.  The mantra for this new mindset is "value," and the platform for many "value" adherents is the Association of Corporate Counsel.  The goal of the ACC Value Challenge is to better align the interests of lawyer and client, and better ensure that each partner to the lawyer-client relationship is sharing both in the benefit and in the risks of their work together.  Some lawyers and law firms are rising to the challenge by restructuring the ways they deliver and price their services, and some are not.  Some clients are pressing for new practices, while others are more comfortable with the old way of doing things.

Some outside counsel are fearful of the types of structural changes that are beginning to take hold, while others embrace them.  It's hard to know for sure whether the push for new models for legal services is a passing fad or a structural change.  It may be that both on the client side and on the lawyer side there will always be a mixed result:  some will change their way of doing business, while others will not.  What I think all will agree on is that, for now at least, and probably for the foreseeable future, many clients will keep a closer eye on the legal spend, and will expect more information and flexibility from their lawyers and law firms.  Those who respond to the need, and who seek solutions for their clients, will thrive, while those who can't get past doing business as usual will find it increasingly difficult to weather economic storms.

Although this is a challenging time, it is also exciting.  Seeking better ways to align lawyer and client interests is eminently rational, and indeed is necessary to preserving the trust that is the foundation for the attorney-client relationship.  It also may be liberating for law firms and their partners.  Once structures, systems, and staff are put in place to ensure the delivery of value, lawyers may find that they have more time to be lawyers.  Which, of course, is what they are being paid for in the first place.

Of course, change does not come easy.  If not done right, it can have serious collateral consequences, not the least of which may fall on the newest members of our profession.  The challenges facing the new generation of lawyers will be the subject of future posts.

Comments

  1. UnknownJune 27, 2010 at 2:57 PM

    Well said. Good post. I'll send it around on Twitter.

    Betsy Munnell

    ReplyDelete

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