… but maybe there is a similarity.
You can’t read much today about the newspaper industry without hearing the many challenges it faces. One of the leading observers has been Jeff Jarvis. His blog is entitled “Buzz Machine,” and his most recent post contains a list of the many waypoints in the digital minefield as it pertains to so-called “dead tree publishing.”
What strikes you is how many of these items also pertain to the legal industry. Here are the first two:
* Tradition is not a business model. The past is no longer a reliable guide to future success.
* “Should†is not a business model. You can say that people “should†pay for your product but they will only if they find value in it.
On better blogs, some of the most interesting items appear in the comments. The list Mr. Jarvis created provoked this response from one Andy Freeman:
Unique gives you pricing power; customers won’t pay you more than someone else charges for the “same†thing from someone else. Value as perceived by customers is how much you can charge – it has nothing to do with costs.
Good only comes in in so far as it is valued by customers and doesn’t help at all with unique.
Give the list a quick read; I guarantee you it will provoke some thoughts about where the law is headed. The biggest failure of many of the former leaders in traditional publishing is that all these challenges were mentioned years ago, but few newspapers or magazines did anything about it.
Some sectors of the legal industry are following this path. Here are two final items from Mr. Jarvis:
* Disruption is the law of the jungle and the internet. If someone can do what you do cheaper, better, faster, they will.
* Disrupt thyself. So find your weak underbelly before someone else discovers it. Or find someone else’s.
So that’s the news for the legal industry; read all about it…
