Short hypothesis thread. Today, most law firms are full-service (many areas of law) and multiple-client (many dozens or hundreds of clients). I’m coming to think that in future, law firms will be one or the other, but will rarely be both. 1/5
That is, most firms will either provide a wide range of services to one client (or an extremely small handful of clients), or they’ll provide a very narrow and specific type of legal service to a wide range of clients. These will be two parallel lanes. 2/5
Why? In the first lane, the organizational commitment required to truly serve the extraordinary demands of a large corporate client will be so vast and pervasive that firms simply won’t have the bandwidth to offer it widely. Your specialty will effectively be your client. 3/5
And in the other lane, the standardization and commoditization needed to serve thousands of clients simultaneously will limit the range of what you can feasibly and profitably offer. Your specialty will effectively be your focus. 4/5
Some behemoths will still provide a mix of the two models, I expect. But most firms will have to choose whether to have multiple offerings or multiple clients. It may simply be too demanding to deliver on both. 5/5
