Internet Newsletter for Lawyers
November/December 2006, by Delia Venables

Delia: What services did you offer?

Margaret: The document web shop was launched in 1998. It was a development of a CD Rom we had produced in 1997 called 'Contracts for your Multimedia Business' which featured about 15 standard documents, notes and case studies to help new media start up companies avoid the most common mistakes. The idea was to provide something that was affordable and useable and would get a business through its early stage without making any basic legal errors. The documents were written in plain English and annotated with notes to help the user understand them.

The document shop window on our web site was arranged in 'shelves' according to the type of business a user was operating, such a design shelves, multimedia shelves and technology shelves. On each shelf you found similar documents such as a confidentiality agreement, freelancer agreement, and a terms and conditions of business. The documents were inexpensive compared to bespoke documents, for example, the Freelancer Agreement and terms and condition documents were £150 and a Confidentiality Agreement was £50 (all plus VAT).

If a site visitor ordered a document, a lawyer would call them to make sure that the document was the correct one and to ensure that they understood how it should be used. The document would then be sent to the user by email and an invoice would follow in the post.

The purpose of the web shop was to grab the attention of businesses who would not otherwise think of using a lawyer. We intended to demonstrate that obtaining some legal advice need not be expensive and that setting things up in a way which ensured the smooth running of the business is a good investment. It was also a way of introducing a business to the concept of intellectual property and how it could be identified, retained and exploited.

We sold several documents a month between 1998 and 2005, generating a few hundred pounds a month. The costs of running the shop were negligible. There was initial investment in creating a set of documents and thereafter we updated documents as and when appropriate. Enquiries were dealt with by junior lawyers whose hourly rates were between £120 and £150 an hour. Even taking into account the lawyer’s phone conversation, the shop was profitable.

Delia: What were the problems?

Margaret: A practical problem was that the service became almost too popular in that a business with more complicated needs would ask why, for example, they were quoted a fixed fee of £450 for terms and conditions of their design business when there was a shop document for £150!

The reason, of course, is that it takes time to prepare a bespoke document that takes into account, with a set of terms and conditions, how the client's business actually runs and what a client wants to achieve. The web site documents were very much starter documents and this was explained on the site. However the need to differentiate between the two approaches to potential clients and to justify a higher charge to the client to take into consideration the time involved in preparing a bespoke document based on client instructions was becoming time consuming and a distraction from our main business of providing bespoke and creative legal solutions to creative businesses.

Delia: Why did you decide to withdraw the service?

Margaret:There were two main reasons. Firstly, the shop had outlived its usefulness to us as a brand profile statement. Briffa was established in 1995 as a specialist intellectual property firm with a stated goal of focusing on small to medium sized business. By 2005 the brand position was well established.

Secondly we found the shop was becoming a barrier to getting our core messages across, namely that, other than for a start up business, there was not a one size fits all solution, but rather that the key to successful business was thinking about what you wanted to achieve and working around that. We considered that promoting the shop further was a detraction from this core message that legal work was something to be valued and used to create maximum value in a business rather than bought off the shelf.

Delia: What services are you offering now?

Margaret: There are two new services we have developed which translate well into the on line environment. These are two insurance polices to help fund intellectual property litigation, one that deals with copyright and design and the other for trade marks. These products are not legal services as such but products. A creative business takes out insurance and if they have a claim under the policy because their work is infringed they can access a fighting fund to help cover the legal cost of dealing with it. These products fit in with our firm’s brand in that it is mainly small to medium sized business who are most likely to benefit. An advantage is that the insurance products cannot be seen as giving advice so there is no danger of providing something that does not adequately address a clients needs.

Delia: Is it easier to offer documents and fixed price services if you are NOT a solicitor?

Margaret: Our web shop helped us establish our brand but it was not a money spinner. Knowing that it was unlikely to generate significant revenue, we kept the investment low and resisted offers to buy in or develop bespoke software to make the system better, for example to help a user compile documents by providing prompts and key words to include in a standard document. For this reason the overall experience that we had with the shop was good.

Selling services on line is however a problem as 'service' implies some level of input by the provider. Unless the service is intended (as we used it) mainly to build profile, it may be that the key is not to provide services but products.

Sale of products on line has a good track record outside the legal field but the sale of services on line is not so well established. We found also that simply fixing a price did not turn a service into a product since, as a solicitor, you still have a responsibility to a user as to what you are providing.

This means that it is easier for a non lawyer to offer, for example, standard documents, than a lawyer. The provider can be seen more as a publisher than an advisor with the commensurate lower level of responsibility to the user.

Delia: What is the future of selling legal services online?

Margaret: This will be challenging for law firms for as long as the pay structure for lawyers in the UK remains as it is today. Lawyers engaged in commercial work command high salaries and their salary expectations are unlikely to be met through the sale of bulk documents at low prices. If lawyers did choose this as a business model it may need to be quite separate from the traditional offering or operated as a totally separate business to avoid the pressure on prices that such a service may have on its bespoke work.

In the future, I think these services are far more likely to be provided by non lawyers, either working independently or as part of an organisation providing legal support such as the RAC or Tesco. Further there may be opportunities for such services in non commercial fields such as conveyancing or divorce where there is more scope for standardisation and where the pressure on pay may not be so high.

Margaret Briffa, margaret@briffa.com.

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