How Should Law Firms Respond
To New Forms of Competition?
By Stephen P. Gallagher

Published New York State Bar Journal, June 2000, Vol. 72, No. 5, p. 24-30.

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Today we are witnessing the early, turbulent days of a revolution as significant as any other in human history. As these new mediums of human communications reach the lives of more and more individuals, law firms and all professional service providers face the same uncharted challenges in trying to shape the direction of future services.

The competitiveness problem being faced by so many law firms today is not a problem of "foreign" competition, but rather a problem of "nontraditional" competition. ¹
This competition among and between all professional service providers has given the consumer the opportunity to shop among the various professions for many of the services that have been traditionally provided by attorneys.

Ross Dawson in his powerful book, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services, states, "Most professional service organizations already recognize that the value added to clients will increasingly be in sharing knowledge with them – making them more knowledgeable – and this approach is also central to developing the closer and richer relationships on which sustainable competitive advantage is based.Those who attempt to hang on to their expertise will soon find themselves supplanted by competitors who are willing and able to make their clients more knowledgeable." ²

Many business leaders are beginning to believe that competition for the future of legal services will actually be competition to create and dominate emerging opportunities – to stake out new competitive space. Where the traditional law firm business model allowed practitioners to focus on the problem of getting and keeping market share, competition for the future is competition for opportunity share rather than market share, which will challenge law firms to provide new products or services that are still underdefined, and where client preferences are still poorly understood. Only those who can imagine and preemptively create the future will be around to enjoy it. ³

It seems apparent that market conditions now dictate the need for a new paradigm for the practice of law, a paradigm in which the client drives the price, delivery and efficiency of legal services. Quality or value in the mind of the customer or client is different – sometimes radically so – from the way the supplier perceives "quality" or "value" with respect to the same product or services, ⁴ and unfortunately, there is no sure way of accurately estimating whether the market will favor a particular type of new service until it is actually available. The supplier's perception, let alone the perception of the governmental regulators of the legal profession counts for little in this point. The jury is out until consumers have a chance to vote with their pocketbooks. ⁵

Until recently, each of the professional service industries thought of itself as distinct from others, and so looked primarily to its direct peers and competitors in learning how to confront key business challenges. Each professional service industry has a tremendous opportunity to learn from the methods of all other professional fields. Confronted with new competitive and market challenges, lawyers across the country face a critical choice: either wait and see what happens to demand for traditional legal services, or anticipate the changes certain to affect their future and act now to shape the direction of these new services.

Because scenario planning is a creative, forward-looking, open-ended search for patterns that might emerge in a profession, the process should help readers better anticipate opportunities and avoid disasters. This article will explore the dynamics of offering integrated services to individual consumers and to business clients in today's networked economy. The focus will be on looking at each situation from the client's perspective.

Crafting the Future of Legal Services

Through an examination of current business literature, we will attempt to scan the current business environment to provide readers with a framework for thinking creatively and making informed choices about what may be, rather than what already is. We will make every effort to expose readers to significant issues, including but not limited to global network forces that may provide opportunities and challenges for readers to create a viable, long-term future for themselves within this turbulent business environment.

The core values of the legal profession are the essential and enduring beliefs lawyers uphold over time, notably the independence of the profession and the commitment to work in the client's best interests without any conflicting allegience. In exploring the future of legal services, the assumption is that these core values will remain intact, enabling lawyers to retain their unique character and value as the profession embraces the changing dynamics of the global economy.

People throughout the legal community are beginning to realize that success takes more than intellectual excellence or technical prowess, and that lawyers will need another sort of skill just to survive – and certainly to thrive – in the increasingly turbulent business environment of the future.

Law firms, as currently structured, are organizations designed to deliver competent legal services to clients who contract for those services. Legal services in this context include all those services that are usually and customarily performed by a licensed attorney. Where formerly law firms were able to control most of the resources needed to provide new products and services, the most exciting new opportunities will require the integration of complex systems rather than innovation around a stand-alone product. There is no reason that law firms in the future need restrict their services and practices to the contracting of legal services.

In mid-1995, the New York State Bar Association conducted a telephone survey of middle income New Yorkers on Access to Legal Services and Use of Legal Services. Six hundred New Yorkers with incomes between $25,000 and $95, 000 were contacted to test respondents' attitudes toward attorneys and their familiarity with attorneys' services. The survey showed that middle income New Yorkers had little difficulty finding an attorney when they wanted one, but middle income New Yorkers did not turn to lawyers in every situation where legal assistance was needed. There appeared to be many opportunities for lawyers to provide significant new services to New York consumers.

Rather than building the new model for legal services based on MDP⁶ / UPL standards left over from a different age, the new legal services model should be based on future opportunities. In a new book, Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy, lawyers can learn a great deal from Philip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster, leaders of The Boston Consulting Group's Media and Convergence Practice, when they describe how managers must put aside the presuppositions of the old competitive world and compete according to totally new rules of engagement. Lawyers, like the managers discussed in Blown to Bits, must make decisions at a different speed, long before the numbers are in place and plans formalized. They must acquire totally new technical and entrepreneurial skills, quite different from what made their organization so successful.

It has been known for some time that traditional academic aptitude, school grades, and advanced credentials simply did not predict how well people would perform on the job or whether they would succeed in life. ⁷ However, many law firms continue to restrict their search for talent to what they consider to be the top 2% of graduates from the nation's premier law schools. From the corporate sector, data tracking the talents of star performers over several decades reveal that two abilities that mattered relatively little for success in the 1970's have become crucially important in the 1990's – team building and adapting to change. ⁸ These skills or talents have never been a primary consideration in traditional law school training, but there is no reason to believe that these talents should not be in equally high demand in today's law firms.

Daniel Goleman, co-chair of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University has found in his research that emotional intelligence is the sine qua non of leadership. ⁹ When Professor Goleman calculated the ratio of technical skills, IQ, and emotional intelligence as ingredients of excellent performance, emotional intelligence ¹⁰ proved to be twice as important as the others for jobs at all levels, in fact, research showed that emotional intelligence played an increasingly important role at the highest levels of the company, where differences in technical skills are of negligible importance.

It is important for all lawyers to think creatively in order to begin to make informed choices about what may be, rather than what already is. To help lawyers identify the new rules of engagement, it is necessary to explore how consumer expectations are changing. It is also necessary to demonstrate how law firms can reshape service portfolios by providing fundamentally new types of client benefits. If the new practice of law must be crafted to anticipate and address what the consumer considers of value or quality, there is no reason that it should not enable law firms to extend the boundaries of their influence beyond the inner circle of traditional "legal self." ¹¹

Let's begin to explore a new paradigm for legal services by starting with a fundamental understanding or belief, namely that, "we have reached the limits of incrementalism," which can be drawn from the writings of Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad in their bestseller, Competing for the Future. Squeezing another penny out of costs, getting a product to market a few weeks earlier, responding to customer inquiries a little bit faster, ratcheting quality up one more notch, capturing another point of market share, tweaking the organization one additional time – these are the obsessions of managers today. But pursuing incremental advantage while rivals are fundamentally reinventing the industrial landscape is akin to fiddling while Rome burns." ¹²

Another important belief or theory in legal circles expressed by Ross Dawson, in his book, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships, is the belief that much of the basic legal services are becoming, "a commoditized market in which clients perceive little or no differences between products and service offerings – they have become indistinguishable commodities. In this case the market becomes price and cost-driven – price is the only way clients differentiate between offerings, and sustainable price competition, in turn, depends on achieving lower costs in producing the offering." ¹³ Ten years ago, William C. Cobb, chair of the second ABA "Seize the Future" conference, estimated that 60% of all available legal work can be considered commodity work, because clients feel that any good lawyer could perform the services. ¹⁴ His predictions pre-dated the emergence of electronic networks, and the greatly enhanced level of consumer (client) sophistication in all aspects of practice.

One of the most fundamental choices every business must make is whether it will follow the path of commoditization, competing on cost and price, or differentiation, in which it competes on offering greater value to the client, with the potential to achieve premium pricing. Today, even those who choose the path of differentiation must accept that it will always be eroding, and they will have to continually keep running just to stay in the same spot, let alone move ahead." ¹⁵ With either approach, law firms can no longer afford to just catch-up to the competition in order to successfully compete in the future.

Crafting Consumer-Driven Legal Services

The practice of law can no longer continue to be viewed principally through the historical prism of a regulated "profession." Legal services are no longer designed, priced and offered to the public based on what the profession deems suitable or appropriate. Many current substantive practice areas are under attack from a variety of forces. Insurance defense practice, family law, estates planning and tax work are literally changing overnight as new Internet-based products and services hit the market. Demands for new legal services are based predominately on market-driven forces, that is, on what the consumer of legal services wants and is willing to pay for.

Law firms are beginning to realize that, what got them here isn't going to support them in the future. Business as usual is just not sustainable. The changes from a product-driven economy to a consumer-driven economy are having dramatic impact on all professional services, and law firms will need to bring about a revolution in the marketplace if they hope to provide expanded services in this consumer-driven economy. As a result, one of the most important challenges facing the legal profession is determining the new range of legal services and client benefits that will be regarded as offering thr greatest value in tomorrow’s products and services. The next most pressing challenge will be to determine how lawyers can best deliver these services in the ever-changing marketplace.

The Internet and the emerging network economy is changing how companies do business, and this is creating an enormous economic power shift from service providers to the consumer. Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad report that few companies (law firms) will be able to create the future single-handedly. "The need to bring together and harmonize widely disparate technologies, to manage a drawn-out standards-setting process, to conclude alliances with the suppliers of the complementary products, to co-opt potential rivals, and to access the widest possible array of distribution channels, means that competition is as much a battle between competing and often overlapping coalitions as it is a battle between individual firms." ¹⁶

In this emerging network economy, we are already seeing changes in the traditional model of commerce, where a seller advertises a unit of supply in the marketplace at a specified price, and a buyer takes it or leaves it. The Priceline shopping system was the first credited with turning that model around. Now, buyers are able to advertise a unit of demand to a group of sellers. The sellers can decide whether to fill the order or not. In effect, Priceline provides a mechanism for collecting and forwarding units to interested sellers – a demand collection system. ¹⁷ One can argue the relative merits of acquiring legal services in this manner, but one still needs to explore the potential impact such a model will have on one's business.

Currently, more than 140 million people worldwide have access to the Internet. ¹⁸ Within the next five years, no corner of the economy will be untouched by downward cost of price pressure created by business models like Amazon.com. Many sectors of the economy that seemed impervious to systematic improvements are also under assault – for the better. In 1999, 34.9 million people sought medical information on the Web, double the number in 1998, according to Cyber Dialogue, a Manhattan firm that tracks Internet usage. There are at least 15,000 health sites on the Web, and more springing up all the time. ¹⁹ This new information is changing the relationship between doctors and patients, who are using the Web to get background information to help frame questions before approaching doctors. Will these sites have an impact on how doctors provide future medical services?

In a recent Law News Network article "Technology from Hell Challenges Lawyers, Scares ABA," author Darryl Van Duch wrote, "More than a dozen Internet-based legal services sites appealing to low-to-middle income consumers have been launched in the U.S. in the last 12 months. Nearly all of them are owned or financed by free-spending venture capitalists." Van Duch continues, "An estimated $100 million has been poured into such "e-law sites" in recent months, including former New York Mayor Ed Koch's "Thelaw.com" and Harvard Law School Prof. Arthur Miller's "Americounsel.com." Many more well-financed clones are expected to be launched in the coming weeks." ²⁰ Keep in mind the NYSBA Middle Income study that showed the publics' lack of understanding of the lawyers' role, and the publics' interest in self-help. The Internet will certainly be offering the public and the legal lawyers exciting challenges.

Another subtle refinement to this consumer-driven economy that promises to impact on the delivery of legal services is highlighted by a recent Harvard Business Review article, where author Adrian J. Slywotzky, describes how customers are already taking the Priceline approach to exact pricing to another level. Customers are now gaining control over the design of products. Customers will soon be able to describe exactly what they want, and suppliers will be able to deliver the desired product or service. Slywotzky uses the term, choiceboard to describe interactive, on-line system that allows individual customers to design their own products or services by choosing from a menu of attributes, components, prices, and delivery options. ²¹

The role of the customer in this scenario shifts from passive recipient to active designer. The author acknowledges that the choiceboard model is still in its infancy, but by the end of this decade, it is anticipated that choiceboards will be involved in 30% or more of total U.S. commercial activities, as our economy moves further away from a supply-driven to a demand-driven system. If Adrian Slywotzky is correct about choiceboards dominating commerce in the future, could "self help" on the Internet begin to displace many of today's legal services? And, what will the role of the new law firm be when customers become product makers?

Managing Knowledge and Creating Client Value

Today, millions of people are using the Internet to exchange massive amounts of information directly and for free. Many people are beginning to believe that much of the existing core legal information will be readily available to the consuming public without the need for any law firm. For the first time, the client would be in control: paying flat fees, having multiple firms bid for legal business, and sometimes bypassing a conventional relationship with a lawyer altogether.

However, no matter what the firm's strategy for adding value is, what seems to be of greatest value is making the client more knowledgeable while helping them to make better decisions and enhance their capabilities. Knowledge distribution, without developing the closer and richer relationships with clients, will do very little to help clients gain sustainable competitive advantage.

Ross Dawson has stated that professionals' (lawyers) greatest fear is that if they make their clients more knowledgeable, they are giving away their key productive assets from which they make money. ²² Since electronic networks now allow information to flow largely independent of the economics of things, information is freely available to anyone with Internet access. Slowly, law firms are beginning to realize that as a result of the emerging network economy, knowledge transfer is not about teaching your clients to do what you do, but making them better at what they do, which by no means results in doing yourself out of a job. ²³

According to Dawson, professional services firms can either try to hold onto knowledge, and perform "black-box" services for their clients, or they can proactively share their knowledge, working with their clients to create value. Dawson refers to black-box services as the traditional approach to providing services. These are services in which the outcome or result is of value to the client, but the process is opaque, and the client is left none the wiser for the experience. ²⁴ A critical difference between black-box services and knowledge transfer is that, by the nature of black-box services, the client sees only the outcome. As such, it is relatively easy for competitors to replicate that result, meaning that the services can easily become commodities. In knowledge transfer, the process is often as important as the outcome. ²⁵

Those who attempt to hang on to their expertise will soon find themselves supplanted by competitors who are willing and able to make their clients more knowledgeable." ²⁶ Ultimately, lawyers will realize that refusing to transfer knowledge to clients will be an unsustainable position. Law firms that are able to help clients make decisions and implement them will add the greatest client value.

Changing times have always created opportunity for aggressive, innovative competitors, while threatening the strength, even the survival, of those too slow to respond. Today, turbulent economic and technological changes are challenging law firms to take bold, unconventional steps to add greater value to client services in this new world fraught with nontraditional competition. One of the key factors that will differentiate today's successful law firms from those in the future will be the ability to adopt approaches to managing change that differ profoundly from the ways they have habitually managed the law firm.

The opportunities for lawyers in these turbulent times have never been more challenging. The laws governing e-commerce have yet to be written, as legal ethicists warn that some of the Internet legal services may be already violating ethics rules against fee-sharing, offering legal advice without a license, and the solicitation of clients. Lawyers need to be vigilant about the dangers posed by new, unconventional rivals; yet they must also take immediate steps to acquire new skills to enable them to use emerging technologies to exceed client expectations.
 

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Stephen P. Gallagher is the director of Law Office Economics and Management department for the New York State Bar Association. He worked as Director of Administration for Temple University School of Law, and as Legal Administrator for several law firms and First Fidelity Bancorporation before joining the Association in 1990. He is a graduate of LaSalle University, and he received a masters degree in counseling from West Chester University.

Twelve Steps in Developing Consumer-Driven Legal Services

1. Establish a Sense of Urgency – Does senior management at your firm have a clear understanding of the dangers and opportunities posed by new, unconventional rivals?
Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad suggest that, in order to begin preparing for the future, you need to ask yourself: "Am I more of a maintenance engineer keeping today's business humming along, or an architect imagining tomorrow's businesses." Law firms need to pay particular attention to the changing business environment and how professional service providers are realigning their products and services in response to these new challenges. Firms that are unaware of what the competition is doing will find themselves unable to participate in the new competitive space.

2. Listen to the Revolution – Law firms have traditionally delivered competent legal services to clients who have contracted for those services. The legal profession must do a better job of listening to its customers, because the insights into the customer's individual needs and preferences will become one of the most important business challenges facing lawyers.
There is no reason for law firms in the future to restrict their core services to traditional "legal self." Although it is important to ask how satisfied current customers are, it is equally important to ask yourself which customers are not even being served.

3. Reshape the Legal Marketplace – Lawyers can no longer afford to wait to see what happens. Instead, they need to anticipate "value" as perceived by customers and provide new products or services based on an entirely new business model or paradigm.
The challenging opportunities to reshape the direction of the profession and the legal marketplace will need a massive transfusion of talented individuals sensitive to emerging consumer demands. Experience is showing that innovation and creativity take place when diverse groups of individuals get together to solve problems. Law firms need to learn from business partners to explore new approaches to problem solving.

4. Think Outside the Box – Take a close look at how other professional service providers are incorporating new strategies and techniques to gain competitive advantage.
If you are looking to establish a knowledge management system to collect and organize internal work product so that knowledge gained from previous experiences can be efficiently recycled for new applications, do not overlook the possibility of reaching beyond immediate law firm competitors. MDPs tend to be well in advance of law firms in the area of knowledge systems and management.

5. Maximize Your Time at Bat – According to Gary Hamel, "Getting to the future first, and being first up on the scoreboard, requires that a company (law firm) learn faster than its rivals about the precise dimensions of customer demand and required product performance. When the goal is to create new competitive space, it is usually impossible to know in advance just what configuration of product or service features, offered at what price point and through what channels, will be required to unlock the potential market.”
To learn faster, Hamel proposes, “A firm needs to maximize its time at bat, rather than sit on the sidelines waiting for the perfect conditions for the home run attempt.” Law firms should begin rewarding staff for experimenting with innovative approaches to client services. Some of these experiments will fail, but others will exceed all expectations.

6. Develop New Skills and Competencies – The new practice of law must be crafted to anticipate and address what the consumer believes is valuable or quality work.
Lawyers need to reinvent the industrial landscape, and new core competencies will be needed to create new benefits or "functionalities." These new technical and entrepreneurial skills will be quite different from what has made their organization (and them personally) so successful, so many lawyers may need to look beyond the scope of the more traditional CLE programs to acquire these new skills and competencies to enable lawyers to create new types of legal services. Law firms will need to look much beyond the top 2% of law school graduates to identify the individuals with the leadership skills and abilities needed to address consumer demands. Law firms will find some of these talents beyond the law school itself.

7. Escape the Bonds of Legacy – The practice of law can no longer be seen as a regulated profession. Law firms will need to bring together widely disparate technologies, manage standards-setting processes, and build alliances with suppliers to shape the direction of future legal services. A glimpse of the future can be seen from the changes taking place in the medical profession and the activities of Internet-based legal services providers.
As legal ethicists warn that some of the Internet legal services may be violating ethics rules against fee-sharing, offering legal advice without a license, and the solicitation of clients, consider the possibility of changing the affected legal ethics rules. Law firms can continue to measure individual timekeeper productivity and profitability, while nevertheless exploring ways to replace hourly billing strategy before clients demand it..

8. Think Beyond the Numbers – Compensation or performance-appraisal systems can force individuals to choose between the new vision of the future and their self-interests. If the firm is currently successful in terms of strong billable hours, complacency can be high, so change initiatives can take time.
The longer the firm contemplates its action, the sooner the firm faces irrelevancy. Price pressures created by new e-commerce business models will only accelerate in the years ahead. These changes will effect every sector of the economy, so the legal profession cannot afford to sit back while other professional service providers redefine their own new areas of practice.

9. Make the Internet Your Best Friend – Sharing knowledge with clients, and maintaining closer, richer relationships with them remains a highest priority for all professional service providers. Although there is nothing new about this strategy, the Internet is providing clients with new tools to acquire knowledge, and using these tools has given clients a much higher level of sophistication in using these new tools.
Because the consumer is driving the direction of future legal services, and the consumer is demanding greater access to information, lawyers will increasingly need to become more comfortable with network technologies in order to be a player in shaping future services.

10. Create Practice Quality Standards – Any law firm's competitiveness – and raison d' etre – is based on its competencies and capabilities and their relevance to its business environment. As law firms continue to expand alliances and affiliations with outside service providers, the infrastructure will need to change to support the delivery of consistent, high-quality legal work product.
Law firm's infrastructure will need to provide all professionals with the tools to work collaboratively among many offices. It will also require work habits supporting remote collaboration, a mutual understanding of the elements that define work quality, and a set of common standards for satisfactory client service. Consumers demand standards of quality, so law firms will have to develop the internal processes and controls to assure standards of quality are met.

11. Implement Knowledge Management Systems – Firms that are able to help clients make better decisions and enhance their business capabilities will flourish. In an era where information that once was sold on an hourly basis is available free on the Internet, firms that rely on Ross Dawson's black-box services, where the client is left none the wiser for the experience, will be called on less and less.
Sophisticated clients are no longer interested in obtaining a lawyer's legal advise; they want a lawyer's assistance in crafting a solution to a business problem. The process has become as important as the outcome.

12. Form Alliances and Partnerships – Many corporate clients have become quite sophisticated consumers of legal services, so law firms find themselves forming alliances or partnerships to provide clients with highest quality services.
Certainly the much-publicized merger of Clifford Chance's with the New York law firm of Rogers & Wells LLP, and the German law firm of Pόender, Volhard, Weber & Axster is a good example of how some of the largest firms are positioning themselves to provide seamless client services. The Internet provides sole practitioners and firms of all sizes some of the same tools available to the nation's largest firms to form seamless client services.

Stephen P. Gallagher

1 See Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future, (Boston, MA.: Harvard Business School Press, 1994), p. 18.

2 Ross Dawson, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services, (Woburn, MA.: Butterworth-Heineman, 2000), p. 28.

3 See Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future, (Boston, MA.: Harvard Business School Press, 1994).

4 See Peter F. Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, (New York City, NY.: Harper Business Press 1999), p. 29.

5 See Peter F. Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century, (New York City, NY.: Harper Business Press 1999), p. 9.

6 See "The Report of the New York State Bar Association's Special Committee on the Law Governing Structure and Operation," Preserving the Core Values of the American Legal Prafession: The Place of Multidisciplinary Practice in the Law Governing Lawyers. Posted onto the NYSBA Web site on May 2, 2000. www.nysba.org/media/newsreleases/2000/mdp.html. The Special Committee is solely responsible for the contents of this report. Unless and until adopted in whole or in part by the Executive Committee and/or the House of Delegates of the New York State Bar Association, no part of the report should be considered the official position of the Association. See "Report to the ABA House of Delegates," The final report of the Commission on Multidisciplinary Practice, posted, at Website: www.abanet.org/cpr/multicom.html, on June 8, 1999. See "Updated Background and Informational Report and Request for Comment," a supplement report of the Commission, posted at the same Website on December 15, 1999.

7 See David C. McClelland "Testing for Competence Rather than Intelligence," American Psychologist, pg. 46 (1973).

8 Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence, (New York, NY.: Bantam Books 1998), p. 10.

9 Daniel Goleman, “What Makes a Leader,” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1998, p. 94.

10 Emotional intelligence determines potential for learning the practical skills that are based on its five elements: self-awareness, motivation, self-regulation, empathy, and adeptness in relationships. See Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence and Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence, (New York, NY.: Bantam Books, 1998).

11 See Facing the Inevitability, Rapidity and Dynamics of Change: A Report to the Board of Governors of the Florida Bar Favoring Adoption of MDP Model and Other Actions, January 7, 2000. P. 14.

12 Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future, (Boston, MA.: Harvard Business School Press, 1994) p. x.

13 See Ross Dawson, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services (Woburn, MA.: Butterworth-Heinemann Publications 2000), p. 39.

14 William C. Cobb, The Value Curve and the Folly of Billing-rate Pricing, in Beyond the Billable Hour: An Anthology of Alternative Billing Methods 17, 17 (Richard C. Reed ed., 1989). The value curve is further discussed in Win-Win Billing Strategies 35-48 (Richard C. Reed ed., 1992) and in Robert J. Arndt, Managing for Profit 56-62 (1991) and in "Back to the Future: The Buyer's Market and the Need for Law Firm Leadership, Creativity and Innovation," Campbell Law Review, Volume 16, Spring, 1994, No. 2 (154-156).

15 Ross Dawson, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services, (Woburn, MA.: Butterworth-Heineman, 2000), p. 208.

16 See Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future, (Boston, MA.: Harvard Business School Press, 1994).

17 Jay Walker, "Redesigning Business, a Conversation with Priceline's Jay Walker," Harvard Business Review, November-December 1999, 19-20.

18 International Data Corporation Web site: www.idc.com.

19 Jeanne Lee, "The Internet Can Save Your Life," Money Magazine, March 2000, Vol. 29, No. 3, p. 121.

20 Darryl Van Duch article "Technology from Hell Challenges Lawyers, Scares ABA," in American Lawyer Media's Law News Network, April 5, 2000.

21 See Adrian J. Slywotzky, "The Age of Choiceboard," Harvard Business Review, January-February 2000, 40-41.

22 Ross Dawson, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services, (Woburn, MA.: Butterworth-Heineman, 2000), p. 22.

23 See Arthur N. Turner, "Consulting is More Than Giving Advice," Harvard Business Review, September-October 1982, 28-34.

24 Ross Dawson, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services, (Woburn, MA.: Butterworth-Heineman, 2000), p. 5.

25 Ross Dawson, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services, (Woburn, MA.: Butterworth-Heineman, 2000), p. 23.

26 See Ross Dawson, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services (Woburn, MA.: Butterworth-Heinemann Publications 2000), p. 28. This book should be required reading, for all professional services knowledge workers. http://www.ahtgroup.com/book.htm.

27 See John P. Kotter, Leading Change, (Boston, MA. Harvard Business School Press, 1996) p. 4.

28 Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad, Competing for the Future, (Boston, MA.: Harvard Business School Press, 1994) p. 2.

29 See E. Leigh Dance, "Delivering Seamless Service: Best Practices of Multidisciplinary Partnerships," Law Firm Governance, Volume 4, Spring 2000, Number 3, p. 6.

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