Looks like another round of belt tightening at law firms is happening and O’Keefe poses the question Will service providers become more competitive?
In HOB’s experience this normally means the duopoly raise their prices whilst everybody else shares a smaller part of the pie. It’s been ever thus and although people may present a number of arguments about technology, a new generation of lawyers etc etc. The simple fact is that the two organizations are behemoths that have to be fed or all hell breaks loose.
He writes……
By turning the design and development into a “software” driven system (SAAS), we have been able to decrease production time on “sites” to about twenty percent of what many of them used to be. This also reduces staff time that used to be tied up in more project management.
As a result, we have reduced costs significantly, and in turn prices. We are now working on some things to further automate what we do, not to reduce the quality of what we deliver, but to deliver better solutions to customers in ways that they expect it and want it.
It’s not always easy to “right size” pricing when it means decreasing prices, but it’s not only the right thing to do, it’s also sound business. It turns out that many customers want levels of “concierge” service that command higher pricing.
For law firms, I’d be looking at how innovate your service and solution providers are. What are they doing with technology to bring innovation and efficiencies? Is the technology they are using today and the people working on it likely to drive greater value, while at the same time lower prices — or at least right sized pricing for what you want and need?
Times are a changing dramatically. Technology and innovation doesn’t wait for anyone. Law firms are going to see continued cuts because of multiple factors — some driven internally by innovation and some driven externally by their clients and the way people use lawyers.
Service and solution providers should feel the same pressure as law firms – the answer is innovation to bring better services and solutions at reduced costs.
His full article at http://kevin.lexblog.com/2017/07/27/service-and-solution-providers-reducing-costs-to-law-firms/
