In the course of a recent Town Hall meeting for GM employees, CEO Fritz Henderson spared us lawyers the time and expense of an MBA by summarizing the teachings of Michigan and Harvard regarding competition in two easy steps.
You can click on the picture to watch (move the player slider to the 30 second mark if you’re in a hurry):

So there you have it. Two ways to compete for customers with products or services:
1. As the low cost provider.
2. As a segmenter or differentiator.
Moving into the legal space, it’s clear that most large law firms, even with forced discounting, still do not want to be a low cost provider. So they try to differentiate. But clients don’t want pay premium prices for all matters (or for all attorneys on various matters). It’s hard to segment when you are trying to cross-sell or be the firm that a client converges on.
So what to do? The answer takes longer than 30 seconds.