Commercial

“A lawyer who has not studied economics… is very apt to become a public enemy” Brandeis J.

Law schools do not generally teach anything about business, as opposed to business law. As a result, lawyers learn about business legal forms and contracts, but nothing about the non-legal imperatives of running a business like corporate finance, marketing, or corporate strategy. Furthermore, as members of an inherently conservative profession many lawyers resist engaging in any topic that goes beyond the four corners of their legal brief (“I only give legal advice”).
This is highly problematic for business, because every legal problem comes within a business context, and lawyers who are not willing or able to understand that context cannot give good advice; Brandeis J.’s dictum is as applicable with respect to business knowledge as it is with respect to economics, and there remains a significant knowledge gap between the practice of law and the practice of business.

Looking for innovation in the delivery of legal services leads naturally to an examination of business of lawyering, as opposed to the practice of law, and there is a large range of potential new business models to be considered.
Many of these are touched on in Richard Susskind’s work, including his 2009 The End of Lawyers. One of Susskind’s fundamental points is that much of what lawyers do is repetitive and not particularly intelligent or creative. In a business context, we often refer to something that is high volume, low skill, repetitive work as a commodity, and in the business world it is a well known pattern that most products have a life-cycle that ends in commoditization.
Surely this could not happen to one of the world’s oldest professions? Susskind makes a good case that it can and will happen to large chunks of what is currently considered to be the practice of law—in any case where lawyers work can reliably be reduced to a process.
 

Bringing legal expertise into business strategy development is the natural conclusion of the process which I have advocated of lawyers to becoming more nuanced and practical business advisors.
In fact, all three topics lie along a spectrum, beginning with practicing law better at one end, moving through those business models that deliver low-level legal services with minimal input from mainstream law firms, and arriving at a the other end of the spectrum where lawyers give high value, and value-creating, strategic advice about the direction of a business long before there are any problems to be resolved.
The keepers of the business strategy profession are largely found in the management consulting industry—firms like McKinsey, Bain, and Accenture. Some of these firms developed out of the accounting profession (moving up the value chain into high-level advisory businesses in the same way that I have suggested should apply to the legal profession), and in the world of modern management consulting the legal environment is merely part of the tableau upon which a business strategy is built.