I am fortunate enough to work in
an organisation full of experts. About several hundred of them all told. They know rather a
lot about what makes the financial world tick.
In fact they often predict how it will tick and why. And sometimes their thoughts move markets. It is a privilege to work amongst them.
You can buy this expertise quite
readily. It costs about £300 to buy an
FT.com subscription and read as much of this expertise as you like for a whole,
entire year. Hundreds and thousands of
articles, most of them analytical, detailed and bathed in expert commentary. FT plug over.
Contrast this with the
organisation I used to work in, contrast it with any Big Law firm. They too are full of experts. They know quite a lot about how the law works. They too can sometimes predict how it will tick
and their thoughts can help their clients move markets, even if they cannot do
it themselves.
You cannot however buy that expertise very
readily. £300 will get you about an hour's
time of someone who has about 4 or 5 years experience and they probably won't
have time to tell you what you need to know in that short hour. One hour.
Which would you rather buy with
your £300? What sounds like better
value? Even putting aside my subjective
bias to my current employer, it is a bit of a proverbial no-brainer isn't it? More economic and financial analysis than you
can possibly read and which will provide you with a year-long competitive
advantage, or an hour on the phone with a lawyer.
Why is there such a discrepancy in
the price and value of journalism compared to professional services? I propose that it is in no small way down to
custom and practice. Down to habitual
lazy behaviour and assumptions which are not challenged by the clients that
instruct law firms. If you need any
evidence of this behaviour, I recommend this excellent piece on Law.com by Mark
Harris, the CEO of Axiom, which states that between 1998 and 2008 law firm
pricing increased by 70 per cent, in contrast to a rise in non-legal business
costs of 20 per cent over the same period.
One such un-challenged assumption
is this – that the level of compensation payable in Big Law Firms is reasonable. That in Big Law Firms, it is reasonable for
PEP to be (give or take) no less than half a million pounds, that it is
reasonable for newly qualified solicitors to be paid salaries in the region of
£60,000 according to Roll on Friday’s data.
These assumptions seem reasonable at face value, but it is these
assumptions which allow (or even require) law firms to charge in one hour what
the FT charges a subscriber in one year.
Contrastingly, there is no assumption in news organisations that a large
proportion of the experts within the workforce must earn high six or even seven
figure salaries (or drawings to be technically correct), which is reflected in the price of the product.
In-house lawyers don't much like
the hourly rate model. There are of
course plenty of alternatives to it these days but most of those alternatives
are still priced on a "time spent" basis with the spectre of the
hourly rate lurking in the background. Law
firm business models require a certain amount of money to be generated by a
certain amount of time spent in order to fund the high compensation packages referred
to.
I wonder if in-house lawyers are
wasting our time focussing on the hourly rate model. I wonder if instead we should be spending our
time focussing on the reasonableness of the assumptions which exist in the
marketplace about what private practice lawyers "should" earn. But we don't, because market norms exist
which make it abnormal to challenge such assumptions.
If news did not exist today as a service
and were "invented" tomorrow, I'm confident it wouldn't be priced on
the basis it is today. What CEO of
NewsCo (geddit?) would assemble a few hundred experts and ask them to write for a year in
order to assemble a product that would sell for about one or two pounds a pop? But
because we are used to news being relatively cheap, it is accepted that it is
cheap, despite the immense value created by thoughtful commentary and analysis
of news.
It's time to drive down law firm
rates. But not just by reference to the
hourly rate. By reference to the irrational
assumption that it is acceptable for clients to help their lawyers become
millionaires.
Let me add an important
rider. I appreciate that Big Law lawyers
are intelligent, work extremely hard and often at unsociable hours. I accept that there is a price to pay to be
able to call on that expertise at any hour, any day of the week. And anyone working at that level of intensity
has a right to expect a high level of compensation, otherwise why bother
frankly. So I'm not calling for the high
end of the legal profession to adopt some kind of Marxist ideology. But I am challenging the assumptions that
exist in the legal marketplace about the "normal" levels of
compensation payable.
A footnote for any aggrieved
solicitors reading this who don't work in Big Law. This post is about Big Law. It is not intended as a criticism of the
thousands of UK solicitors who ply their trade on the high street or elsewhere
for more modest compensation. And if you
are an aggrieved solicitor reading this and working in Big Law, then feel free
to pull my arguments apart in the comments section below.