Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Standardizing legal services

Legal visionary Paul Lippe wrote a recent article about the lack of standardization in the legal profession and forecasts areas where he sees standardization is imminent:

• How clients assess and communicate about the performance of lawyers cries out for standardization, so clients can give consistent feedback, incent improvements in performance, and provide a consistent way for law firm leaders to interpret data.

• How firms charge for work on a “value” basis beyond simple time will be standardized, so firms and clients can compare like to like (products liability defense litigation in Arizona to civil litigation in Colorado).

• How firms share information with clients—now a crazy quilt of alerts, blogs, seminars, treatises, multistate surveys and podcasts—will migrate into a more consistent and integrated model.

• How firms and clients work together to construct documents, or make choices around contract terms will continue to simplify or we will all surely drown in complexity.

• The general way lawyers and clients communicate will standardize through “profile-centric” systems (not “social networks”), just as 15 years ago email became the standard communication tool displacing FedEx and the fax machine (remember that one?) and three generations ago the standard communication tool was “lunch at the club.”

Do you agree with him? Can you think of other ways?

I predict an upcoming poll out of this.

Full article here: http://legalonramp.com/index.php/What-Aspects-of-Legal-Services-Are-Most-Likely-to-Get-Standardized.html

No comments: