Why would lawyers give away legal documents for free? Or better yet, why wouldn’t they do it? Daniel Doktori offered some good answers to these questions when he wrote recently in TechCrunch about Big Law’s answer to the Open Data movement.
But what’s most remarkable about the big lawyer giveaway – get there early, get your legal docs, we’re opening this year at 6pm on Thanksgiving Night! – may be how unremarkable it really is.
Doktori writes of law firms’ “mimic[ing] their small clients’ ‘freemium’ business development model”, suggesting that giving away free stuff is simply a way to get clients in the door where they (hopefully) will become paying clients. Perhaps. But it seems unlikely that a cash-strapped startup will hire a $700 per hour firm of attorneys simply because that firm gave away a generic founders’ subscription agreement. And with so many law firms offering the exact same documents – Doktori cites his own firm’s service as well and those of Cooley LLP and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP – there’s not much here to really differentiate the value of these documents in the first place. Not to mention the various non-law firm startups getting into the same game, including Founders’ Workbench (mentioned by Doktori) and low-cost services from Rocket Lawyer and others.
In fact, certainly with the more generic of these forms, you might wonder how a law firm could justify charging for these documents in the first place. Giving them away isn’t really much of a concession these days.
On the other hand, genuine goodwill has genuine huge value. And that’s the part that really is un-remarkable. There’s nothing all that innovative in telling potential clients that, “look, we want to work with you, and of course we want to make money doing so, but we really want to do so only where we add actual value.” Doktori makes this exact point, where a law firm sends a great message to potential clients that “It has the scale to afford giving away the once-‘secret sauce’ and the quality to bet doing so won’t cannibalize business.”
Well, in truth, it probably will cannibalize some business. If you’re a lawyer thinking of making money from things people really don’t need to be spending precious seed money on (READ: gold-plated legal services for incorporation services and generic organizational and investment documents), then you might be in trouble. But there’s always need for downstream services where a lawyer really can add value.
Another take on this: Open Data. Put it this way: Business lawyers, like all service providers, have to justify their value in order to justify their commanding fees. It probably was never true that business lawyers were the only ones who had “access” to the ways and means of how business was transacted, and were therefore necessary for that reason alone. What may have most changed is where in the business process lawyers bring value. The recent commoditization of basic business legal documents did not create this reality, but has simply brought it into relief.
As Doktori puts it, “That message is founded upon the idea that law is a service, not a product. As one lawyer explained, ‘what I’m telling you is that my documents are not what makes me special – it’s the advice behind the documents.’” Lawyers, by virtue of their experience and yes, their “access”, have a trove of content – the basic language of business transactions, essentially data. Separating out the product (or the “data”) from the service, focuses the value of the business lawyer on the service.
If a benefit of the open data movement is freeing up nonprofits to allocate limited resources to projects that work (see, for example, Idealware’s discussion of Splash, a nonprofit that seeks to provide healthy, clean drinking water to children, and its use of open data to transparently share information about projects), an analogous benefit to lawyers is freeing up the talents they can actually bring to their business clients.
