Comments on: Free and Law Firms

By: Marketing Legal Services the Free Way

Marketing Legal Services the Free Way — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 22:43:06 +0000

[...] ever-thoughtful and social-media-savvy Doug Cornelius has a great blog post, Free and Law Firms, commenting on the book Free: The Future of a Radical Price and how it applies to the marketing of [...]

By: Books I Read in 2009 | Doug Cornelius .com

Books I Read in 2009 | Doug Cornelius .com — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:04:52 +0000

[...] My review: Free and Law Firms [...]

By: More on Free and Legal Services: WhichDraft | Compliance Building

More on Free and Legal Services: WhichDraft | Compliance Building — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:03:02 +0000

[...] Free and Law Firms [...]

By: Jay Shepherd

Jay Shepherd — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 04:39:54 +0000

Great post, Doug. We've been doing some similar thinking on this topic. I believe it will take law firms a verrrrry long time to get past the client-alert model and take a truly freemium approach. But those of us who jump first will be well positioned to take advantage of this phenomenon. Nice work.

By: Amy Campbell’s Web Log » Marketing Legal Services the “Free” Way

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:12:12 +0000

By: Business Law Attorneys, Atlanta Business Attorneys and Lawyers | Atlanta Georgia Business Attorneys

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 04:44:37 +0000

[...] Given that I am a Lawyer, I kept thinking about how his concepts apply to Law firms. Let me say a few things up front. First, this is an excellent book that will make you think about how these concepts apply to your Business. … Free and Law Firms | Compliance Building [...]

By: Doug Cornelius

Doug Cornelius — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:06:59 +0000

Librarian -

I am not underestimating the expense it takes to produce the content, run the email server and run the web servers. There is a lot of expense. But I want to draw a distinction between absolute cost and marginal cost.

That $160,000 is spent whether 5,000 people receive the content or 10,000 people receive it. Adding the next person to the distribution has almost no cost when sent electronically.

When they had to buy the paper, envelopes and stamps and pay people to put it all together, law firms were much more discretionary about who received the alert. There were real costs to the distribution.

Chris Anderson’s point is that when the marginal cost gets close to zero, it is better to round down to zero.

You need to make the money in the premium service. For lawyers that is putting the information from those client alerts into action.

By: Your Favorite Librarian

Your Favorite Librarian — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:42:16 +0000

Don’t under-estimate the expense of producing a client alert. The stamps are cheap,but the manpower to create the alert takes considerable attorney and staff time to research and produce. One firm I know, has one attorney working almost full time producing a popular client alert. At a minimum, that is 160K to produce the client alert.

By: Free and the GP

Free and the GP — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:01:05 +0000

[...] legal profession? Potentially, a great deal, as some legal bloggers have noted. Carolyn Elefant and Doug Cornelius both point to innovative new offerings from two well-known US law firms: Wilson Sonsini has set up [...]

By: Doug Cornelius

Doug Cornelius — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:34:39 +0000

Jason -

A big chunk of what lawyers do is already free.

The primary law (statutes, regulations and cases) is already free. Lots of the end product of a lawyers work is free. Many court publish the briefs and other filings. The end product of many transactions is also free. Edgar is full of precedent documents for anyone to grab. The registry of deeds is full of real estate documents.

The value add for lawyers is bringing together the expertise to get this all working together. Where they are not adding expertise and value, a lawyers work will get marginalized and may get pushed towards free.