CBA Record April-May 2018

com/. Attorney Laura Wasser designed this product to allow couples in New York County, in New York City and throughout California to handle their divorces and child custody arrange- ments online. How to Get Started If you’re interested in turning your firm’s services into products, first consider which of your services can be packaged. There is probably a lot of low-value work you spend your day on that you can either give away or package up and sell at a fixed cost. Next, consider what you reasonably can maintain. Custom technology is very expen- sive, and content-rich offers, like an expert system, require constant updating. Weigh what resources you can bring to bear on a solution like this. The way you determine the technology platform for your products depends on what you’re building. You will want to consider custom development if you are building something that has high potential for ROI, either because you’re selling it for a profit or because the client work has a substantially high lifetime value. Consider your client base and potential for scale versus the cost of the solution. Make sure you will be building something that your clients want for a price that makes sense. Because it’s wiser to try to buy a solution before you build one from scratch, here are some options to consider: Chatbots • LawDroid. https://lawdroid.com/. If building your own bot is intimidating, LawDroid can help! Run by attorney Tom Martin, this site can help you think through how your firm could use a bot–for intake, screening, automat- ing consultations, and even document generation! • Docubot. http://aux.ai/. With example bots for legal intake, expungement and legal wellness, 1Law’s Docubot wants to help lawyers tap the estimated $45 billion dollar legal services market for “people who have too much for pro bono work, but can’t afford private legal services."

LPMT BITS & BYTES BY CATHERINE SANDERS REACH Adding Online Legal Products to Your Service Offerings

Catherine Sanders Reach is the Director, LawPracticeManage- ment & Technology at the CBA. Visit www.chicagobar.org/lpmt for articles, how-to videos, upcoming training and CLE, services, and more. Richard Susskind, the legal futurist, wrote about different levels of legal services, including bespoke, standardized, system- T here has been a lot of discussion about whether artificial intelligence (AI) will take lawyers’ jobs. In some areas that may be the case, especially for document review, contract generation, and legal research. AI may also predict out- comes better than lawyers. However, much of the “competition” for the consumer market is not sophisticated and expensive artificial intelligence. Online legal services are based on tools that lawyers can easily adopt‒automation, document assembly, decision trees, and expert systems. Exam- ples available to consumers by non-lawyer groups include bots such as “DoNotPay” or online services such as LegalZoom or RocketLawyer. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of these non-lawyer legal services entering the market solving every problem from contract review, protection of intellectual property, estate planning, bankruptcy, immigration, and business law. What can your firm do to compete? Consider turn- ing your services into products! What does this mean? As a lawyer, you provide ser- vices. Other businesses sell products (e.g., Target, grocery stores, digital products). To “productize” your services turns them into product offerings.

atized, packaged and commoditized. What work do you do that is often the same, but for a few tweaks and details? Those are the efforts that can be productized. How do you approach productization? You are not creating something out of nothing—you are converting your services into something else. That “something else” may be free, maybe not. You must also think differently about pricing, with flat fee and predictable pricing structures such as subscriptions to match the discrete products. You can use these products as marketing tools, such as white papers, training videos, books/e- books, online tools and apps. Or you can focus on creating products that generate revenue. Products as Revenue Generators How can productizing help you gener- ate revenue? You need not run a product business to generate additional revenue for your firm and to compete with Legal Zoom, and Rocket Lawyer. Most law firm “products” have three things in common: a fixed price, a well-defined scope, and a neatly packaged solution. Here are examples of law firms that have generated revenue in this way: • Littler’s CaseSmart & Compliance HR. https://www.littler.com/service- solutions/compliancehr. Compliance software licensed to Littler’s clients for a fee. They also offer free tools, particu- larly one in response to the travel ban. • Counsel for Creators. https://counsel- forcreators.com/. A California firm focuses on providing business services to companies in the creative economy. The firm has a subscription plan for businesses. • It’s Over Easy. https://www.itsovereasy.

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