In L. Frank Baum’s ‘The Wizard of Oz’, a young woman finds herself in another world searching desperately for a way to get home. She is told of a magic wizard who is “all great and powerful” and can help her do… well, pretty much anything, actually.
After searching for hours on end, following the yellow brick road, taking a few breaks to sing and dance and finally arriving at the Emerald City, the woman in question is face to face with the illustrious wizard. However, when the curtain is pulled back, she is met with a regular man who has simply recruited a large body of staff to make him look good.
If this sounds completely irrelevant, trust me: it isn’t. For too long, businesses and individuals have been faced with the challenge of finding high-quality, reliable legal support for a reasonable price.
Why?
For many years legal services have been like a deep abyss. The ‘unknown’. We instruct a solicitor and hope that we’re getting a good service and value for money. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case.
We walk the yellow brick road, we travel to the capital city to a renowned traditional law firm in search of an all ‘great and powerful’ lawyer to help us with our legal issues. We pay a significant amount, but often we aren’t even aware of what we’re paying for.
Well, we, as lawyers on the front end, thought it was high time that the curtain was lifted and more transparency and openness was available to you.
The problem with traditional law firms
When you instruct a solicitor to assist your business, or for your own individual needs, you aren’t just instructing that solicitor. You’re instructing the solicitor, their secretary, their P.A, their paralegal, their paralegal’s paralegal, their paralegal’s grandmother and finally the woman their paralegal’s grandmother met in Tesco the other day.
Okay, this is an exaggeration. But there is some truth to it.
Though your solicitor will be at the forefront of your case, they will also have several legal secretaries working alongside them to do “the grunt work” and “admin” side of things. Therefore, when you receive your bill, a large chunk of the sum will exist to cover the costs of the extra staff.
Another chunk of the costs exists to cover the cost of the property the firm operates from. After all, a central London location doesn’t come cheap.
It’s no surprise then that the price of legal services is so steep.
However, as a result, clients feel overcharged and underserved and find themselves constantly browsing the market for a better deal. Law firms are becoming acutely aware of this issue, but unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot they can do.
So, they rebrand. A fresh lick of paint to the walls and a fresh new website. Their web copy suggests they are revolutionary, doing things differently.
“We aren’t like a traditional law firm,” they say. “We’re different.”
But they aren’t. It’s just smoke and mirrors.
Giving the Titanic a new paint job wouldn’t have stopped it hitting the iceberg and getting a new website won’t change the fact that traditional law firms are a slave to their own model. As long as they have to pay for their overheads, everything will remain the same.
The solution for your business
Now, a new type of business is emerging, and 360 Business Law is just the beginning.
As a virtual, technology-led law firm, we don’t have to pay the costs of renting out office space. Instead, we come to you, wherever suits you best. That doesn’t mean we’re less available. In fact, we are available round the clock: 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.
As a result, we use that money to enlist the services of well-renowned, heavy-weight legal professionals across the globe to help our clients.
Rather than hiring an army of paralegals, all the work we do is carried out by these specialist lawyers, all of whom are vastly experienced within the profession.
The “grunt work” has become facilitated by technology – the legal work that consumers imagine to be magical and mythical, in fact, involves a couple of clicks on a computer.
If that wasn’t enough, we’ve also provided a new alternative to the billable hour. While we do offer a fixed hourly rate, we’ve also created a subscription service. So, rather than charging our clients for our legal advice for each individual issue when it arises, we’ve packaged our services into one monthly plan which comes at a fixed fee, without compromising the quality.
Now, the consumer knows exactly what they’re paying for. They’re paying for quality. They’re paying for industry leading experts at a fraction of the price they would pay for the traditional law firm and their legion of extra staff. They’re paying a fixed price each month that they can guarantee will not increase.
Sound too good to be true?
It isn’t. In fact, this new model leads to our clients seeing a 15-20% reduction in internal legal fees and a 40-60% reduction in external legal fees each year.
So, is the traditional law services model changing for the good? Yes. Definitely.
In the face of change, we must evolve. If we can’t evolve, we become extinct.
It’s time for the dinosaurs to rethink and reinvent and put clients first.