16
Lawyering in
Your Sleep
B Y J A S O N D I R K X A N D A M Y M O N A G H A N
I
n his 2008 book The End of Lawyers?
Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services,
Richard Susskind predicted that
packaged services (or productization) would
enable lawyers to "mak[e] money while
[they] sleep." That future is now and law
firms are packaging their services into all
kinds of legal products. But what solutions
work well as legal products? What are the
pitfalls? How do you even get started?
For our purposes, we will consider
a "legal product" to be any instance of
attorneys and firms packaging knowledge
and processes for commercial gain,
including off-the-shelf products and hybrid
product/service offerings. Our goal is to
address the challenges and recommended
practices around packaging legal services
and to start a conversation with those who
may be building legal products without
categorizing their activities as such. While
there are many more complex topics around
packaging legal services (such as marketing,
pricing and sales, attorney compensation
and ethical considerations, among others),
we will focus on the "why" of legal products
and how to get started.
Some mainstream examples of
productized knowledge and services include:
• TurboTax - takes rules of tax law and
accounting practices and bundles
them up into a package that serves
the needs of a vast majority of
consumers;
• Rocket Mortgage - collects
information from mortgage-seekers
and initiates workflows that
facilitate the mortgage process,
combining technolo with human
workflow interaction;
• LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer -
provide an array of legal services,
ranging from automated documents
such as wills and incorporation
materials, to full-scale legal services.
An Approach to Legal
Product Development
