Ask a law firm leader how they standout in the elite market, you might be met with a choreography of dazzling words.
“We’re differentiating.” “We’re a disruptor"; “We’re nimble.”
So often are these lines uttered they’ve become industry platitudes. Perhaps firm leaders have magnified the small adjustments they’ve made to traditional ways of working such that the sense of being pioneering, 'a disruptor', is real.
The problem of differentiation, of standing out in a market in which the product on offer is broadly homogenous, is hardly unique to legal. But remember: talking about being a disruptor doesn't make you one.
At a recent event, I asked a U.K. general counsel what she made of the recent trend of law firm leaders accenting 'disruption' and ‘differentiation’—if it was real, imagined, fabricated. She offered a charitable view. It's important, she said, and she'd seen positive developments at firms across tech, diversity and CSR owing to wanting to be different and upsetting the status quo. But the only two factors she really cared about and that dominated her decision-making when discriminating between counsel: “Quality of people” and “quality of advice”.
What really matters, the GC said, is whom you 'click' with. And opportunities for 'clicking' are often serendipitous—right place, right time, right people. At what was a social event, perhaps the GC thought it indecorous to mention 'pricing' in her criteria. I'll take the liberty to include it anyway.
It's a tall order to expect elite lawyers of similar schooling, training, cultural learnings and with the same understanding of what it means to be a corporate lawyer to differentiate significantly along relationships, advice and pricing.
Don't get me wrong—corporate lawyers can be awfully clever: deals are skillfully crafted, poison pills invented, fiendishly constructed models deployed in advancing the client’s best interests. Perhaps one firm is better at leveraging tech than its neighbor. And some firms have excelled at seeking, and seizing, opportunities where others have been left behind (I shan’t blather on about Kirkland & Ellis’s well-documented cornering of the top-end PE market, nor Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan’s genius in riding the anti-bank and latterly the class action waves).
Indeed, the ability to spot and dive head-first into new markets we can suitably call a differentiating factor, and one that is surely a hallmark of a disruptor.
But, be honest: are you a follower or a leader?
