Collaborate, or Die?

A high proportion of Yuzu's current opportunities are being developed together with our investor, law firm Pinsent Masons. But is ‘collaboration’ a dirty word in the legal services market?

Pinsents have shown courage in dipping their toes into the pond of products and services which are complimentary to their core offering. I can’t imagine it has been easy for partners to contemplate their valued client relationships being disaggregated. The client/law firm relationship is both valuable and fragile – valuable in that it touches issues at the core of the company’s strategy, yet fragile in that it can often seen as a substitutable commodity.

Building collaborative partnerships in the legal services space is a great way to increase the value of the client relationship while reducing its fragility. In my experience, lawyers shy away from this. One reason might be that whilst law firms strain to maintain profits at historically high levels, they fear that margin dilution that expanding into other products may bring. Another might be a disabling fear of breaching ethics or regulation. A third is likely to be the partnership model itself – eat what you kill, rather than hunt collaboratively to protect the ecosystem.

There is no obvious or accepted model for collaboration by law firms with others. Most of them think of collaboration as ‘disbursements’, an over-complex word to describe services that they can’t (or won’t) provide themselves, and so had to procure from elsewhere but didn’t want to swallow into their margin. Even the most obvious form of legal collaboration – between Solicitors and the Bar in the UK – is largely undiscovered territory.

Firms need to start thinking bravely about providing more products which are adjacent to the space they already occupy. Hundreds of years of providing nothing but legal services doesn’t equip you well for that, which is where collaboration comes in, whether it be in relation to people, process or technology. One notable example is DLA Piper who bravely decided that, rather than build its own flexible resourcing arm, it would white label Lawyers on Demand’s already market-leading product. I would be interested to hear opinions about other examples of collaboration – successful or unsuccessful – between law firms and third parties.            

At Yuzu we think there is a huge amount of room for collaboration with law firms. Firms have lost over half their work by volume to in-house teams over the past 10 years. Why not gain back some of that share of wallet through a collaborative partnership with us?