The Rainmaker Blog : Law Firm Marketing and Business Development : The Rainmaker Institute : Stephen Fairley : Professional Legal Marketing

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We’ve all heard the expression “Innovate or Die,” but how many of us really thought about the practice of law in conjunction with that phrase?

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is out with a new book that is all the buzz on the talk show circuit; it’s called That Used to Be Us, and focuses on how making innovation a priority can help our nation retain/regain its superpower status.

Innovation is very much at the forefront when it comes to the legal profession these days, as evidenced by venture capital investments in Rocket Lawyer and other online legal service providers.  

Jim Calloway, an Oklahoma attorney who writes a blog about law practice management, recently conducted an interview with Richard Granat, the lawyer behind DirectLaw and current co-chair of the eLawyering Task Force of the ABA Law Practice Management Section. They discussed how venture capitalists are changing the way that small firms and solos will practice in the future; here are some quotes of note from Granat:

I see a “buzz” or “new paradigm” going around this community ( “the VC community”), that it is time to break the back of solos and small law firms by funding disruptive experiments that are designed to bring real change to the delivery of legal services, no matter what impact it has on the livelihoods of solos and small law firms.

I think that the economics of solo and small practice is undergoing a major transformation. Lawyers will still be able to demand high fees for complex, value-added work. For tasks where there is a large information component which can be manipulated by software, such as web-enabled document automation systems, lawyers will feel the effects of disintermediation, just as other industries have that have been transformed by the Internet.

To compete in today’s connected world, lawyers need to pick up the skills to market their services online and to deliver legal services online. If you are not online, you are nowhere.

There is no question that the same forces that enabled Amazon to change the way we buy books and Apple to change the way we buy music are bringing about a similar evolution in the way consumers buy legal services.

The question to be answered now is, will small firms and solos innovate or die?

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