A gift for you, some prizes for some and a reminder of the intersection between law and IT

Most will be aware of our passion for being ‘for friends’ – our ‘why’ that ensures we create solutions that we would be proud to offer to our closest friends.

A significant part of where we invest our skills to achieve this 'why' is in the ‘uberification’ of estate planning law, which means we heavily focus on technology enabled solutions.

This also means we have become used to ‘failing fast’.

Most of our fails are private and do not hit your inbox. Sometimes, like yesterday, our fails are public and involve dumb things like promoting an upcoming webinar AFTER the webinar has been held …. That is, our promotion of the webinar we held earlier this week - ‘Adviser Facilitated Estate Planning – Everything you need to know to deliver exceptional value’.

In seeking your forgiveness, we (as those who attended the webinar were promised) offer anyone who sees this email the following:
- a full copy of the slides
- an electronic copy of our 2015 edition of consolidated blog posts (you are free to use any of this content however you wish – with or without acknowledging source)
- the weblink for free access to the webinar recording, under the heading ‘Free recorded webinars’

For the 5 most interesting (as unilaterally determined by our team) one liners about our fail (or lawyers generally) shared on our LinkedIn page over the next week we will send you a proof of one of most popular book releases yet – ‘40 Forms of Trusts’ and free access to the 90 minute webinar that View presented recently which explains each of the 40 trusts – seehttps://viewlegal.com.au/product/recorded-webinar-package/

For those who attended the webinar (or view the recording), attached are our solutions in relation to estate planning, business owners solutions, trust succession and superannuation benefits.

You can view a summary of our wholesale solutions at https://viewlegal.com.au/pricing/(please note that you will need to be logged in to the website to view this page).

If you would like us to consider the appropriate package for your client’s circumstances, you can submit a free review on our website under https://viewlegal.com.au/estate-planning-free-review/

Finally, some useful flyers and videos are available in our estate planning toolkit to assist the clients with their estate planning and can be viewed at https://viewlegal.com.au/resources/

We confirm CPD/CE points for most professional bodies are self-assessed and this email can be produced as evidence of attendance at the webinar which ran for 60 minutes of technical content. If any other particular requirements are needed other than this email please let us know.

A final disclaimer – one liners and lawyer jokes submitted may form part of the next edition of our book ‘101 best lawyer jokes ever’ – see https://viewlegal.com.au/product/101-lawyer-jokes/

Gladwell and the Future of the Professions

Recent posts have looked at recent publications that provide insight into the likely evolution of the time billing business model of most professions.

Another author that provides perspective on this theme is legendary thinker Malcolm Gladwell and his release David and Goliath (see - http://www.amazon.com/David-Goliath-Underdogs-Misfits-Battling/dp/0316204366).

In many respects, the book uses a myriad of practical examples to highlight how the theories underpinning Christensen's innovator's dilemma play through.

The central theme of the book is that the very things that make an incumbent, dominant market leader strong can in fact be their greatest weaknesses with someone who does not play by the rules.

Indeed, while I cannot easily see it referenced in Gladwell's book, the famous quote by Mark Twain is reinforced many times –

The best swordsman in the world does not need to fear the second best swordsman. The person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before, does not do the thing he ought to do and therefore the expert is not prepared for him, does not do what he ought to do and often the expert is then caught out and is ended on the spot.

As mentioned previously, we began the journey to address many of the challenges of redefining the professional services firm business model over 10 years ago.

For many, the journey has started more recently and we believe it important to share our learnings. Our upcoming July roadshow will be a full day example of this.

Download the brochure here.

Before then, our free webinar on Thursday this week (that is 28 April) will also share a number of insights (see - https://viewlegal.com.au/product/free-webinar-foundations-for-the-future-28-april-2016/)

Insights on the Journey to Value Pricing

For those who do not otherwise have access to it, the contribution I made to a recent eBook published by LegalTrek is extract below. The complete eBook that features among others Ron Baker, David Wells, John Chisholm and Ed Kless is available at the following link – https://legaltrek.com/afa-ebook/ Our legal services business has operated entirely on a fixed price basis since 2004.

This said, timesheets were not completely eliminated until 1 July 2013 (see photo attached!), shortly before founding our firm View.

There have been challenges, mostly unpredictable, however unsurprisingly no one in the team is likely to volunteer to fill a timesheet in ever again.

A key influence has been VeraSage, the international think-tank dedicated to eliminating hourly billing from the professions (see - http://www.verasage.com/). Consultant John Chisholm is the leading Australian based Fellow of VeraSage and is a fantastic mentor, as are the trail blazing firms associated with the group – see - http://www.verasage.com/thelist/

The key lessons we have learned in running a truly ‘timeless’ firm include:

1. Parkinson's Law is a serious challenge even without timesheets – perhaps counterintuitively our key performance metric is still time related; that being – what is the duration between agreeing on a scope of work and delivering that scope to the customer.
2. Communication both internally and with customers is vital. Many law firms only exist because of Murphy's Law (i.e. everything that can go wrong will go wrong). Successful fixed pricing almost entirely depends on carefully planning and agreeing a defined scope. If there is a legitimate change to scope that could not have been identified at the start of a project, there must be real time communication within the team and immediate engagement with the customer.
3. Centralisation of all team learnings in a logical and easily accessible manner is critical. This includes (using VeraSage founder Ron Baker's language) ‘AARs’, being after action reviews (see – https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130303194245-38251380-replacing-the-performance-appraisal). This 'non-billable' concept is rarely, if ever, done in a time billing firm. In a fixed price firm it is a discipline that must become automatic.
4. The Goldilocks Principle helps explain why we always provide the customer with alternatives in the level of service that is provided. The time billing professions remain essentially the only industry in the western world that do not empower their customers to choose service levels, and this one change to our approach has been vital.
5. The Donkey Principle explains that the best performing lawyers in a time billing model are generally of least benefit in a fixed price model - the impact of this culturally cannot be underestimated.

There are numerous other impacts that we have seen, sometimes on an hourly basis (no pun intended).

Ultimately, the most important lesson is the depth of cultural change because what timesheets do (even when you are fixed pricing) is create a focus solely on what is billable.

Without timesheets, the focus is solely on what is valuable.

This one concept has an impact on every part of a professional services business. Increasingly we are finding customers get this, and are allocating their legal spend accordingly.

As I suspect is the case for everyone in the VeraSage community, we happily share our experiences with others contemplating changing their business model.

As mentioned previously, we began the journey to address many of the challenges of redefining the professional services firm business model over 10 years ago.

For many, the journey has started more recently and we believe it important to share our learnings. Our upcoming July roadshow will be a full day example of this.

Before then, our free webinar on 28 April will also share a number of insights (see - https://viewlegal.com.au/product/free-webinar-foundations-for-the-future-28-april-2016/)

Image credit: Brian Turner cc