Automated contracts, free legal documents and the singularity

I wrote about the coming legal practice singularity recently. Legal practice is changing rapidly and the prospect of a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence to start taking over many legal research and similar tasks is fascinating. Unfortunately for many lawyers the wait may not be quite as long as it may take for such artificial intelligence to arrive on the scene.

Lawyers are accustomed to services that offer standard contracts for reduced prices. Some retailers and bookstores have been selling common agreements like leases and powers of attorney for quite some time now and there are a number of online options too, including Law Unlocked which was pointed out to me today. The next step is a site which promises a DIY solution which should scare lawyers who rely on legal documents themselves for their fee income.

Desktop Lawyer offers a self-service option to customers whereby they can have fairly complex agreements like shareholders agreements prepared for them by answering a series of questions. The process is apparently so dynamic that you actually see the document take shape as you work through the questions. The end result is a document that goes beyond the current "one size fits all" model because the service's users will be able to download a fairly customised agreement that better suits their specific needs. This is unlikely to be the end of the road for the technology and we will likely see more and more advanced solutions that will replace lawyers whose focus is document production as an end in itself. In other words, the market for "search and replace" precedents will give way to these sorts of smarter and more cost effective solutions.

This likely future touches on my thoughts about the current legal services model and the very real need for lawyers to rethink the value proposition in their work. The days of value being based on time or documents are just about over and lawyers who can't adapt will struggle to survive. The value in legal services is in lawyers' knowledge of the law and how to use the law to develop appropriate and effective legal frameworks for clients. The documents reflecting or embodying those frameworks are worth about as much as the paper they are printed on.

In keeping with this emerging reality, I am rethinking what my clients will be charged for going forward. We will start removing documents as line items in our invoices and effectively treat them as free. Documents we produce for our clients will be released to those clients under a Creative Commons license to enable clients to make more flexible use of those documents and I am working on a service for clients which will effectively release fairly standard documents to participating clients as a value add at no charge for the documents themselves. I am still working on the parameters of this pseudo-open source approach to legal practice and will ensure that important considerations like client confidentiality and custom legal frameworks are adequately protected but the days of charging for relatively standard legal documents are coming to an end.

What do clients want and how can lawyers deliver?

John Giles, one of the partners over at Michalsons, published a post every lawyer should read. His post is titled "What clients want" and it certainly got my attention:

I recently used an attorney to evict one of my tenants and recover rent that they had not paid. It was really interesting to be on the other side of the fence for once. Rather than being an attorney providing a service to a client, I was the client receiving the service from an attorney. I must say it was not a good experience. But I learnt a lot from it and it made me realise “what clients want“. So here are some of the things that, as a client, I wanted. I have made a promise to myself that I will always try to do the same things for my clients.

Giles sets out a number of ways attorneys can really improve their levels of service and more effectively give their clients what they really want from their advisors. I wish I could say I have been doing all these things for my clients but it is so easy to get caught up in the myriad tasks and deadlines that I too easily forget about some of the basics.

Being an attorney is a complicated occupation. There must be a dozen attorneys in a kilometre radius from my office (and just about any other street corner you may find yourself at in most major cities) and competition for some types of work is fierce. As clients become even more cost conscious attorneys are pressed to adopt a number of strategies to secure and keep their clients. Many attorneys in smaller firms will charge lower fees and attorneys in larger firms just won't do work for certain clients who can't afford their fees. Add the perennial perceived value challenge to the mix and the end result is often a land grab for as much work as you can bring in. The problem with that approach is that unless the volume of work is appropriate given the type of cases involved (volume works well for debt collections, not much variation), the danger is not dedicating enough focus to each file and the client behind that file.

At that point service quality deteriorates and clients become frustrated. Some clients will ask questions, challenge their attorneys where they are not giving enough feedback and others will keep quiet, perhaps assuming that this is normal and that something must be going on. That latter group of clients is perhaps most worrying and too easy to overlook.

I've been thinking about this quite a bit and the solution, for me at least, is probably a little counter-intuitive but I think it is the right one. My solution is to be far more selective about which clients I take on and spend more time focusing on a smaller client base and the work I am most passionate about, aiming for much improved and personal service. We all have clients who are not our ideal clients or who simply don't see the value in what we do and delay payments or simply don't pay at all. Those clients also tend to take up a lot of time which, given time's scarcity, comes from time that could be spent on the sorts of clients we'd rather focus on. That often also comes after our less than ideal clients persuade us to reduce our fees to barely break even levels.

I remember having a conversation with Richard Mulholland one night in Japan in 2008 as we walked through the streets of Sapporo to find an Italian place for dinner. We were talking about pricing professional services and, at one point in the conversation, Rich made the point (I'll paraphrase what I took away from his point) that when you start charging more for your services, whether it be to focus on better paying work or to place a higher value on your work, some clients will stop briefing you and move on to more suitable advisors. What happens in the process is that you find yourself in a position to give your clients who remain far better service without the constant worry about where the money is coming from to pay bills.

It sounds pretty cold to reduce client choice and the manner in which a business is conducted to Rands and cents but these are businesses intended to make a profit and sustain their proprietors, freeing them to focus on the important stuff - their clients' files and their objectives.

What Giles is talking about in his post is meaningful and personal service which should be every attorney's goal (well, at least those attorneys who would like to cultivate a loyal and better quality client base). These are things worth doing well.