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From the incumbent’s point of view, the only thing worse than a revolution that topples you is one that renders you irrelevant. You can mount a comeback from exile; you can’t mount a comeback from Nobody Cares. Law firms, pay close attention. We’re now less than six months away from the implementation of the Alternative Business Structures (ABS) provisions of England & Wales’ Legal Services Act. This event has been forecast as law’s “Big Bang,” the equivalent of financial services deregulation in the UK in the 1980s, although I suspect this will be a long rumble of change rather than a sudden explosion. But as we get closer to October 6, signs are emerging that should be making British firms very uncomfortable and firms elsewhere in the world more than a little uneasy. It’s quite possible that the biggest change in legal marketplace history will pass law firms by. The Legal Futures website reported last week that English and Welsh law firms are finally starting to take ABSs seriously and are becoming more amenable to external investment. The bad news: the investors may already have lost interest. “City solicitor Paul Harding, who heads ABS Advisory Partners, said he was ‘absolutely convinced’ that private equity firms were getting ‘cold feet’ because of the difficulties they foresaw from investing in partnerships. … Mr Harding said law firms do not really understand what an investor would require of them. ‘They’re thinking about creating capital value that they can buy and sell, and not looking any further than that. They’re in for a shock. If money is made available, they won’t like the terms.’” Subsequently, at an ABS-themed conference sponsored by Legal Futures, Richard Susskind issued the same warning: most law firms will not be invited to this party. “Law firms hold few attractions to private equity investors because there is no obvious exit route and little profit, he said, predicting that external investment will be made exclusively in new forms of legal business: ‘These are the businesses that are growing; doubling, tripling, quadrupling every year. Of course they’re going to attract investment.’” When you think about it, the idea that private equity will bypass law firms and roll straight into new business models makes perfect sense. As any managing partner will tell you, running a typical firm is a task that inspires mythic adjectives like Herculean or Sisyphean. Law firms resist corporate management the way cats resist baths. John Wallbillich at The Wired GC illustrates this perfectly by listing five reasons why law firms couldn’t adopt the Goldman Sachs model:
Source: law21 |
