This article is the 2nd part of our study on “The great strategic transformation of law firms”. We are interested here in the shocks that the legal market has experienced over the last 10 years.
Many forces have indeed been exerted on the legal market since 2005 in the United States. Their effects have been really felt since 2015 in the daily practice of the legal profession in France.
First of all, it was a societal change that took place, and which called into question the status, the model and the very exercise of the legal profession. This desacralization of the profession is one of the main sources of market transformation.
The customer has taken the power. From the status of “Price maker”, law firms have become “Price takers”. This paradigm shift is a real revolution.
Societal transformation induces a Copernican revolution.
This must be embodied in organizational changes and work within law firms themselves: this is where the strategic transformation of law firms.
Deregulation and Desacralization of the Legal Market
“The digital revolution is an anthropological revolution” (in “Digital transformation: the advent of platforms”, the Ferryman p.29) remember Gilles Babinet, former president of National Digital Council and Digital Champion for France to the European Union. By this he means that the advent of the Internet and in particular the mobile Internet (from 2007) is revolutionizing the organization of society and even the relationship between men.
The transformation of society began in various areas, first affecting food and commerce in the 70s, then banking and monopolistic services in the 80s, and finally energy and telecoms in the 90s. XNUMX.
The development of the Internet is the primary cause of this anthropological revolution. When the whole world is accessible through a small box, competition and comparison are easy and merciless.
It was then the wave of deregulation of the 2000s which gradually affected the so-called “protected” sectors. The status of the liberal professions was called into question and that of lawyers began to change. The legislative developments of the 2010s accelerated this trend and finally anchored in the texts a reality that legal professionals had already experienced for a long time.
The desacralization of the function preceded the deregulation of the legal profession and constitutes the real cause of the destabilization of the legal market.
The customer takes the power
This development was first felt in the client-lawyer relationship. Until now, the client had a relationship with his lawyer comparable to that of his family doctor. No questioning, no pressure on prices, or on the method. He was already very happy that someone was interested in his problem!
Reputation, expertise, relationships allowed the lawyer to impose his price. The customer, impressed by such height, paid without flinching.
Transposed into strategic language, the lawyer was a “price maker”. It is the supplier who determines his price in relation to his costs and what he considers to be acceptable to the customer.
The client's empowerment tends to reverse the client-lawyer relationship. From now on, the client considers the lawyer as one service provider among others, perhaps even a little more traditional than others. He no longer accepts a fait accompli or the absence of evaluation of the price and quality of the work provided. The lawyer is now a “price taker”
Reputation, expertise, relationships bring clients to the lawyer who request quotes, negotiate prices and put him in competition.
Strategic transformation is necessary
Where partners were traditionally the sun of the firm, we must now put the client at the center of the firm. It is therefore indeed a Copernican revolution that law firms are called to. The entire firm, working in collaborative mode, must organize itself for the benefit of the client.
Strategic transformation is therefore necessary for everyone without it being possible to avoid it. In this regard, it is useful to convene a few qualified personalities to be very clear on the inevitable nature of the changes at work.
- Richard susskind : “I predict that lawyers who are not inclined to change their working practices and expand the range of their services will face a bitter struggle for survival in the next decade” (" Tea end of lawyers ? Rethinking the nature of legal services ", Oxford University Press 2010, 2st ed., p. 269)
- Kami Haeri : “New technologies have given rise to a feeling in the profession equivalent to that of the Great Fear of the Year XNUMX” (in “Future of the Legal Profession” handed over to the Minister of Justice, to download here: [download id=”587″]
All these changes are real and are already impacting the daily activity of lawyers. It is now clear that the legal market is facing a major strategic transformation. To lead these changes, we must avoid anxiety reactions and take stock of the actions to be taken.
We will see in a future post that the change will be a success at the cost of 3 transformations
- Cultural: changing mentalities within the firm
- Organizational: developing work processes
- Digital: relying on the tools that enable change
