The last thing you need in recessionary times is a bubble. Those of us who ran large P&Ls, budgets and fought hard to keep the mortgages of hundreds and thousands of staff paid through Y2K, the Dotcom bubble and the ensuing recession a decade ago frankly take a very dim view of Wiki/Web2.0 hype right now.
The legal industry owes Richard Susskind a considerable debt in getting past the technology averse slow adoption years - but that job is done. His core concept of the progression from bespoke to commoditised drives his belief that web based information solutions have a transformational role to play in future legal services. It may be heretical - but I simply don't agree with the basic model. Having spent many years in possession days in Wandsworth county court, duty rotas in Bristol and running teams in tribunals nationwide I think he is missing a trick frankly - there is nothing bespoke about the 15th drunk in custody on a Sunday morning, the umpteenth Wages Age scrap, or the benefits cock-up behind yet another possession order. And there is nothing inevitable about a progression to standardisation or packaging either.
So forgive me - when I see exhortations to populate deserts - my advice is that it's usually a desert for a reason: think again. This is the Christmas tree market in February conundrum; usually it is a solution looking for a problem.
Consumers do need help with the law, and the solicitor profession has been uniquely poor at dealing with "justice" for the lower middle earning families; broadly speaking "consumer law". The last decade has been all about offloading much of that responsibility to the insurance industry. They've done "well" with some areas, notably conveyancing and PI, but they struggle with inherently personal stress purchases, and even wills are proving harder than they thought. Can the Co-op do divorces in bulk? It's not in their top five.
And the reasons are simple. Divorce is complex. Yes, form E can be automated, but are we really expecting couples to go on-line, share documents, questions and answers with other divorcees, use guidance from the government and lawyers on what to do when, and maybe call a law student in a Belfast call centre to double check at 3am?
Well, good luck with that. Complex consumer legal work needs a more creative solution. Web based document automation is not the right place to start. It may well be part of a successful solution in due course, but at best it is the carburettor, not the engine, and certainly not the driving seat.
The problem is that buyers of the consumer services most in need of help are inherently unstable, financially jeopardised, highly emotional and deep in denial. Faced with a maze of complex "stuff" that they really don't want to become specialists in - no amount of facebook camaraderie is going to stop them piling into anger - long before the bargaining ever calms down enough to get realistic. Very few lawyers "get" this. End users do not want to become lawyers, and God knows we have enough barrack room ones already.
The concept that there is some latent market of hundreds of thousands of consumers who will beat a path to your door for some WrongedEx.Net is misguided. You can already get "managed" divorce solutions if it genuinely is a clean break for around £250 from web savvy firms. No emotion, no decisions, no road blocks, no kids, no property? - no problem, pay and wait - but these are not where the access to justice problem lies. Government guides to all this are frankly a waste of public money; they are great at designing a web service for a new regulation, but they are uniquely bad at keeping it up to date and relevant to changing circumstances. All government achieves in this situation (and frankly Institutes are no better usually), is to suck any chance of profit out of the market and dissuade the professional information teams from bothering.
There are examples from commercial law sectors of how packages can be constructed which combine both better solutions for the advisor and the end user. Firms like Practical Law, ECA, AdviserPlus and Ellis Whittam are more likely to illustrate how business models can work well in a web environment. Lawyers should look there, not the US, before diluting their pro bono efforts, trashing document banks or throwing more costly app developer time at phantoms. Especially now, the US is in a large Wiki bubble. I'm happy to be a lone voice saying that neither Facebook or Twitter are really worth that much. Mr Susskind exhorts the profession in the Times (June 9th) to build a Wiki free, and ofcourse the publishers will donate their know-how free too. And this is "attractive". We have been here before, and it was a side show.
No comments:
Post a Comment