4 Steps to Productize Legal Services and End Billable Hours

Productizing legal services means transforming legal services into legal products sold to consumers online for a fixed price or by subscription. Lawyers tailor legal services for every client, from start to finish, and charge customers by the billable hour.  The traditional legal model is expensive, and day-to-day legal work is repetitive. 

Turning regular and repetitive legal work into legal products customers buy online benefits the consumer and lawyers. Productizing legal services removes the pressure on lawyers to maximize billable hours. Billable hours cause lawyers to burn out and lose the work-life balance. Productizing legal work lawyers perform repetitively means lawyers focus on strategic legal services that require bespoke service delivery. Customers get certainty about the price, and lawyers deliver affordable solutions to more customers.

Legal design allows lawyers to innovate legal processes and uncover hidden customer needs. Legal design allows lawyers to standardize and streamline services to sell online.  

Passive income for lawyers is possible.

What is a legal product?

Legal products package legal processes, people, and technology to deliver a salable product at scale.  Legal products focus on one legal problem and solve the problem well. The best legal products include an exceptional customer experience so the customer knows what to expect, who to speak to, and how to use the legal product. 

Lawyers who use legal design to create a legal product are able to productize any legal service they offer. The four steps we use at Lawyers Design School are focus, standardize, automate, and document.

My first legal product was a shareholder agreement. Customers bought a fixed-price product with a standardized process.  

For you, it can be another agreement, document, or something completely different.

How to Shift From Billable Hours to Legal Products.

To shift from billable hours to legal products requires productizing legal services. Legal products package a lawyer’s expertise into a fixed product at an upfront price and sell at scale. Legal products shift the focus from billable hours to providing value.

Productized service offers predictability for lawyers and is easy to sell. Legal products allow lawyers to stop trading time for money and start pricing for the value created.

Legal products offer customers a compelling value proposition with a clear scope and set price. The best legal products are easy to understand and buy. 

Lawyers practicing in particular areas of law have a client base who require the same thing from legal documents or services. Shareholder agreements are an example. Other specializations are complex and have a diverse and bespoke client base, and productizing legal services is challenging but possible. Legal design allows lawyers to dig into the end-to-end process to determine if aspects are suitable for productization. Productizing a section of an end-to-end solution is possible too.

Shifting from billable hours to legal products starts with a willingness to look at legal work with a new perspective. 

Think about the way you currently provide your legal services. Can you create a standardized document suitable for recurring customer issues? Can you streamline your service delivery process? 

Consider the template documents you use to create agreements and other documents for your clients. What if the generic contracts were standardized using contract design and sold online at a fixed price? Lawyers are able to offer a price for additional advice and customization, but the service delivery is transformational. And no billable hours.

4 Steps to Productizing Legal Services

The four steps to productizing legal services are listed below.

1. FOCUS

  • First, find a clear focus. The productized legal product focuses on one service for one customer at scale. Move away from doing everything for everyone.
  • Map out customer needs through customer research. Develop an understanding of the exact needs your customers have. What solutions do they look for? What legal services are you providing repeatedly to solve the same issue? What are they already paying for? What are the questions that keep coming up? At this stage, the aim is to find the one service your customers are willing to pay for.

2. STANDARDISE

  • Unpack your current service process. Write a list of questions you ask from your customer in the first call. Document the steps you take to produce the service, for example, a document. Answer questions: what, how, when.
  • Look for repetitive elements. Think about the majority of your customers. Can a simple process with minimal customization serve their needs? The aim is to avoid customization that does not provide value to the customer.
  • Create a questionnaire in plain English. It allows the customer to explain their needs and the outcomes required. Include items customers need to remember to consider. Provide a simple guide for the customer on how to use the questionnaire. The guide explains the legal concepts, the purpose of each question, and how they are usually handled.
  • Create a standardized template for your product, including variable modules to suit different situations.

3. AUTOMATE

  • Once you have mastered stage one of your standardized product, it’s time to take it to the next level with automation.
  • Automate part of the process and make it even more efficient, for example, by automating the document creation.
  • Hot tip! Incorporate a call or a short meeting to reassure the customer that the automated service suits their needs. The promise of personal service, even if the telephone call is quick, builds trust and reassures the customer about the service. Personal service is essential to reassuring customers and convincing them to buy the legal product.

4. DOCUMENT

  • Create a service blueprint that describes your customer’s service journey step by step. Document what work happens behind the scenes at each stage of the process. The service blueprint is the foundation of your productized business. Start with what you know. Refine and add more detail as you go.
  • Write a compelling value proposition for your customers. Use plain language to explain the problem and how the product solves it. The customer is searching for a solution, and a legal product demonstrates how it will quickly solve the problem.
  • Create sales copy with a compelling product description. Describe the problem your product solves, what the package includes, the benefits, and the price.
  • It is equally important to be clear about exclusions and where customers incur extra charges.

Start selling and improving the product as you gain more experience in what works and what doesn’t. 

The result of the design process is a relatively predictable service product without the pressure of billable hours.

The four steps are legal design in practice. Lawyers are designing the legal process and information to serve the customer in the best possible way. Legal design and productized legal products empower the customer because they have price certainty and value the product in terms of how easy it was to use rather than how many hours it took to achieve an outcome.

Legal innovation is empowering customers and giving more people access to the law. The traditional legal model of end-to-end service excludes more people than it serves.

Finding the Balance with Productized Legal Services

Finding the balance with productized legal services is avoiding over-customizing your product. Lawyers learn to tailor every solution to each customer. Litigation and strategic client work require client-specific services. Everyday legal work is repetitive, and the application of legal design allows lawyers to identify suitable services for productization.

Productizing legal services helps customers who need the middle ground. A solution they are confident with and feel they get value for money. Legal solutions that are delivered online and produced by a lawyer the customer can speak to.

Customers searching for an accessible legal solution in 2024 struggle to find one. The legal profession delivers end-to-end service with full customization for each customer. Traditional legal practice is expensive, labor intensive, and excludes access for many. 

People looking for an affordable legal solution turn to the internet for free or low-cost advice or templates on Google. Free templates and online forums are not ideal for customers who want a solution specific to their needs.

Legal products accompanied by the lawyer who developed them are the balance.

Think about the daily legal work you do. Look at where you start to make your services, products, and products more digital. Start your journey into legal design by innovating the way you d

eliver your legal services. Streamline and productize your legal expertise. 

Start small, and billable hours will be a thing of the past over time. 

I struggled with this when I first started. But it is true. Legal innovation requires lawyers to change the delivery of legal services in a way that serves our customers and not lawyers.

My Journey into Legal Products

I had my law firm and was constantly bothered about needing to serve more customers. I wanted to build a profitable business that would help customers excluded from legal services but not drown me in work. The solution seemed only possible once I discovered how to productize my legal services and stop charging by the hour. 

Since starting my business, it has been important to me to lower the threshold for buying legal services. I only achieved this in the initial years by lowering my hourly rate, which was unsustainable.

The low price was detrimental to my brand – I inadvertently gave the impression of an inexperienced beginner. The customers I was targeting were unable to pay the lower rate, and I needed lots of customers to break even.

The Challenges of Shifting from Billable Hours to Legal Products

My target customers were start-ups, small businesses, and entrepreneurs. I knew they had compelling needs for legal help and minimal budgets. The customers needed shareholder agreements, but my price was too high. Customers told me they would find a template on Google. 

My challenge was that, at the time, I was a single mom with a small and vocal baby who didn’t like to sleep. The only hours available for work were late evenings and nights.

 I was stuck. The customer base existed at a different price point. I had a desire and know-how to serve them, but the barrier was manual work and the price of the service. In practice, I had to sell my time, which I didn’t have and which customers couldn’t pay for. I was constantly baffled by how to serve more customers profitably without having to work overnight.

Legal design in action – From Billable Hours to Legal Products

The initial solution was to productize the shareholder agreement into a fixed-price product with a standardized process.

I knew customer needs for the shareholder agreements were similar. I defined my target customers precisely and selected the marketing channels and my marketing message according to my target customers. I secured customers whose needs matched my offering.

Most of the shareholder agreements requested were basic agreements between entrepreneur shareholders. Entrepreneurs wanted to start, and the shareholder agreement had to be in place. Banks or other third parties requested the shareholder agreement, and the entrepreneurs saw the agreement as an item to tick off the list to start.

I started the legal design process by analyzing the customer needs and steps of drafting a shareholder agreement, identifying recurring elements, and documenting them. On this basis, I formulated the following process for preparing the shareholder agreement:

I mapped out the customer needs through a few key questions. At this stage, the aim was to understand whether a simple, fixed-price shareholder agreement was sufficient or whether a more tailor-made solution was needed, in which case the service and the pricing would differ.

I gave a fixed price and explained the package for simple shareholder agreements. A fixed-price package included the first draft, a half-hour online meeting, and one round of modifications. I was clear about what the package included and what cost extra. Managing customer’s expectations was necessary so that the customer knew what to expect from the service. 

To get a cheaper and predictable fixed price for the service meant that the service included fewer customized steps. And customers were okay with this.

After the customer accepted the offer and after the customer onboarding process, I sent a questionnaire to the customer, which mapped out the customer’s needs and desires in terms of content. This list was based on years of practical experience with entrepreneurs’ needs and my recommendations for the minimum content in the agreement. The questions included plain language explanations of what the questions meant and what kind of things the entrepreneurs should consider among themselves. Later, I developed an online shareholder agreement guide to support the questionnaire.

Crucial at this point was that I explained to the customer the concepts I used, the intended purpose of each contract clause, and how the customers typically agreed on any issues. For example, if I had only asked the customer whether or not the agreement was subject to a competition restriction, the customer would not have been able to respond and would have needed me to open the concept to him. Instead, I translated the questions into the customer’s language and explained each item from the customer’s perspective. Short practical examples were a good help.

The process is legal design in action, how you design the legal process and the information to serve the customer in the best possible way. The legal product empowers the customer to make decisions and implement them, for example, by creating their own contracts. The best legal service is not always serving customers personally and tailoring it from start to finish, especially when a tailored service excludes most customers from the entire service.

After receiving the answers to the questionnaire from the customer, I compiled the shareholder agreement from the pre-made and adjustable modules by choosing the appropriate clauses and combinations for the first draft based on the answers. I  added explanatory comments or additional questions to the draft for entrepreneurs to consider before the joint review. 

I sent the agreement draft to the customer and asked them to go through the draft carefully. An important part was encouraging an open dialogue on the real-life questions behind the clauses because agreements are much more than what is in the agreement. Agreements are a matter of trust, transparency, and mutual support in different situations.

The process included a half-hour face-to-face meeting and making the agreed changes to the contract.

The entire design process resulted in a relatively predictable service product that started to work well right from the start. 

I wanted to improve the process.

Automating the agreement creation

The next iteration was automation. I had the process for creating a fixed-price shareholder agreement. Why not automate part of the process to make more work more efficient?

I didn’t know anything about legal tech at the time. I thought that automation would be easy since I already had a paper-based process where I used the customer’s responses to compile the shareholder agreements from different modules. Personal legal advice was limited to customers who paid for it, and the standardized creation process happened online.

I learned by doing. I hired a developer for the project who then hardcoded an online service where the customer could create a shareholder agreement tailored to their needs and get my advice afterward. I designed the questions in Excel, compiled and followed up questions, and the clause modules for the agreement where required. The developer coded the service based on this Excel.

My First Online Sale

I launched an online service I invented and designed myself. I pressed publish, and there it was, out in the world. The feeling was incredible. The money arriving in my bank account for my first online shareholder agreement was delightful. I got a notification from my phone of the payment confirmation. I remember the moment vividly. I had just come home from work and was feeding my hungry toddler. It felt unreal. It felt great.

You can do it too.

Grab a virtual coffee with me and let’s figure out the next step!

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