Don't Let Exceptionalism Keep You From Improving Your Revenue Stream

Lawyers tend to get stuck on law practice exceptionalism, "the belief that nearly every aspect of the practice of law is unique and must be considered in isolation from what we see elsewhere," writes Dennis Kennedy in The Productization of Legal Services. And that can keep them from adopting new strategics and techniques that will raise the bottom line. But it doesn't have to be that way:

Consider these examples:

• Ernst & Young creates and publishes a popular (as I write this, in the top 100 among taxation books on Amazon) and affordable ($24.95) annual tax guide for the public.

• Attorney Larry Katzenstein creates and sells a widely used software program called Tiger Tables that computes actuarial factors for tax calculations and planning.

• A prominent technology company sought out a law firm to create a document assembly application for standard agreements that the company would license on an annual subscription basis.

• A law firm produces training videos on legal topics for sale to the public.

• A law firm packages research information updated on an annual basis as a subscription offering.

At the heart of each example is adapting a service or set of services traditionally done by time-based billing for a single or limited number of clients into an “information product” that can be licensed or sold to a much larger audience than the client base. The result is a new revenue stream that can be added on to the traditional services model. In other professions, this approach is often referred to as “making money while you sleep.”

Kennedy outlines a nine-step process for "productizing" legal services that can help you supplement and even enhance traditional services. Read the post. Try something new.

The future of law? Different.

Patrick Lamb's "What Does the Future of Law Hold? Three Predictions" from his The New Normal column at the ABA Journal Online. For the first time in three years, I wasn't able to attend Georgetown University Law Center’s Future of Law Conference. Fortunately, Lamb was (as were others whose posts we will be featuring this week). This post contains Lamb's takeaways from the sessions, three changes in the legal profession that he sees happening in the relatively near future. They're not particularly revolutionary, at least not at the start, but as they take hold, they could certainly help revolutionize the way law is practiced, the way clients obtain legal services, the nature of those services and the value the that clients receive. Sound over the top? Maybe. Read the post (and comments) and decide for yourself.

Today's Law Marketing Resource

Dennis Kennedy's "Happy New Tech Year: 4 First Steps for the Next 365 Days" at the ABA Journal. Looking for some simple resolutions, the kind that actually help you change, that you won't break mid-January? You can stop looking. You don't need to lose 20 pounds or start going to the gym every day to improve your relationship with technology, just read this post and follow this advice.