Late last year, I offered to a room full of attorneys that they should consider emulating McDonalds when it comes to delivering consumer legal services.
Yes, the response was underwhelming. But hear me out:
Think of restaurant dining and legal services as solutions to problems. Dining solves the problem of hunger and nutrition; legal services whatever our legal problem (or, perhaps, opportunity) might be.
When it comes to dining out, one option is McDonalds. It’s quick, predictable, calorie-dense, and cheap. And while the “quality” of the McDonalds dining experience from the subjective perspective of taste might be low, the “quality” from the objective perspective of food safety is on par with other restaurants (and probably higher than average).
Now, if you want a dining experience that is higher in a subjective quality like taste, novelty, or ambiance, you will choose something other than McDonalds. That experience will almost certainly cost more – perhaps orders of magnitude more – but you will make that choice knowingly and openly. And, critically, the restaurant you choose won’t be any different from McDonalds on the objective quality measure of food safety.
Now, on to legal services.
If you’re a consumer in need of legal services, you face a legal marketplace where 95+% of the providers are offering only Chez Panisse-levels of services. Fancy, full-scope, custom services. And let’s put aside for a moment how well they are delivering on that quality promise [too often, not well], and ask the harder question: do consumers of legal services really WANT only the option of dining at Chez Panisse? Or would many of them just rather have some of that fast-predictable-cheap McDonalds action?
We know the answer to this question already. In every other category of goods and services, consumers are used to trading off price for quality. And, predictably, most of them will choose the lower-cost / lower-quality option.
It’s not just McDonalds vs. Chez Panisse. Think staying at the Motel 6 vs. The Ritz. Flying Frontier vs. any other airline. Buying clothes at Old Navy vs. Nordstrom. The subjective quality differences scale all over the place.
And here’s the thing: it’s completely rational for consumers to make these choices based on their own needs and economic condition, as long as the most important measures of objective quality are reasonably similar. Which they are; a mix of marketplace dynamics and consumer protection regulations ensure that minimum levels of objective quality are met.
So knowing that consumers in every other category want the option of a quick, predictable, affordable experience, why don’t more lawyers offer it? One common reason I hear repeatedly is that every legal problem is different, and that lawyers need to provide a sterling level of diligence in order to meet their ethical obligations and avoid malpractice.
This is a bogus objection. McDonalds doesn’t offer a high degree of food safety because they custom-make and inspect every burger and order of fries; they do it because they’ve consciously built up the processes necessary to provide this quality at scale. And lawyers could also offer cheap-and-predictable legal services, at high objective quality, but in order to do so they would need to re-tool their processes to support it. But rather than so doing, too many lawyers continue to rely on handwork, hoping to entice the small “fine dining” segment of the legal market.
So a lot of what’s blocking the opening up of a much bigger segment of the legal services market is mix of inertia, aversion to change, and a lack of facility in business process design. I am far from having all of the answers to this, but if you’re planning on attending Lawyernomics 2017 this April in Las Vegas, my talk will be focused on exploring this opportunity in more detail. I hope to see you there.
Josh – great analogy. And there is a firm in Canada that’s been doing this in spades for a couple of years now and growing like wildfire from what I can see: http://www.axesslaw.com Fixed fee, fixed menu services rather than the bespoke custom luxury offerings that traditional law firms covet. Their offices are located inside of Walmart stores and are purpose-built exactly along the lines you describe. I have no relationship/affiliation with this firm – I just think they’ve understood and executed on this market opportunity brilliantly. They’ve received a fair bit of legal media coverage in Canada – check it out if you want to see a case study on just how right you are.
Thanks, Doug – that’s a great example. It’s analogous to Zoomcare and other “minute clinics” here in the states. Not the sort of place you’d go with a gaping head wound or rare tropical disease – but for the everyday stuff it’s a far better choice than the chaos and delay inherent in going to the “full scope” hospital.