McLaw v the Supersizers
Is the future for law firms really as a franchise? Ailsa Dixon investigates
If you are one of those lawyers still ducking behind a desk every time a colleague mentions the dreaded acronym 'ABS', you may still be blissfully unaware of the latest craze sweeping the rainmaking classes. The future, they say, is franchises.
Coming to a high street near you soon, nestling down between your local Starbucks, Subway and Specsavers, will be your homogenised, recognised and sanitised solicitors. According to those leading the war on Tesco law, you can forget all that 'find a solicitor' search engine stuff everyone was harping on about last year. They'll already be dead in the water by the time justice minister Jonathan Djanogly waves his LSA starter flag.
Well that's the theory anyway. There's still plenty of phrases to be coined and analogies to perfect before this McLaw model manages to reach the radars of remoter regions of the profession '“ and then there's also that sticky subject of investment '“ but the race is officially on to become the UK's first household name solicitors brand.
Quality street
True to form, it is QualitySolicitors that is currently out in front, both in terms of numbers of clients and the noise its making.
What was originally set up as a 'marketing collective', has decided to tear up its original blueprint and evolve. 'This was working well enough,' says Craig Holt, barrister at 7 Bedford Row Chambers and founder of QS, of his early referral-style model. 'However, there was a lingering concern. We were, in effect, operating as a high-budget, glorified 'find a solicitor service'. We lacked the presence to generate real awareness among the public.
'When the LSA comes into effect, 'find a solicitor' services will become largely extinct. They only operate successfully now because of how fragmented the legal market is. When people need a lawyer there is no brand name they can immediately think of and go to. So they have no choice but to go online and type in 'solicitors in Liverpool'.'
So it is now a franchise firm, albeit, according to Holt, 'not quite' a fully-fledged one. Member firms retain their name alongside the QualitySolicitors prefix and they only rebrand 'extremely successful and well-established firms' rather than licensing the franchise to new practices. But there is no doubt the QS name is the head honcho in the model. 'In many regards the more appropriate analogy is the 'Best Western Hotel' umbrella branding model,' explains Holt. 'Here, independent hotels group together under a shared branding with common values and expectations but retain their individuality, their own pricing structure.
'It is a way to benefit from being part of something of real marketing power but still retaining total independence.'
And it is all systems go for the group, after the first 15 QS locations opened in May. The next batch of 50 will be open by next month, with another 50 set to cut their ribbons in February. 'In a few short months we will be catapulted into the public conscious by sheer force of our physical presence alone,' chimes Holt.
First contact
But for every QS you have a Contact Law. The referral firm grew roots well before the ABS countdown began ticking, and has already been snapped up by American giant Thomson Reuters as a guinea pig for any eventual liberalisation of the US legal scene.
Director Dan Watkins is not planning to join the gaggle of franchise fans, sticking to his firm's original model. 'Our view on Tesco law is that 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em', and, rather than trying to complete with the likes of Tesco, Contact Law is in partnership talks with a number of the large retailers to offer our quality-assured network of law firms to them on a white-labelled basis,' explains Watkins.
'No doubt these brands will do some of the commoditised legal work in house, but the more complex and personalised legal services won't be cost-effective for them to deliver, so their clients who need these high-value services will be channelled into the Contact Law network.'
Although similar to one another in that Contact and QS are well established, relatively well known among both lawyers and clients and are well funded, the two firms earnestly rebuff the idea that they are rivals. When asked whether Contact can offer a law firm enough brand identity to beat off the ABS competition, Holt replies: 'Bluntly, no.'
Similarly, Contact counterpart Watkins expresses little envy for the other's model: 'Unfortunately for QualitySolicitors, despite their aggressive expansion strategy, the reality is that it will be much easier for a retailer such as Tesco to raise the £5 to £10m needed to mount such a campaign.'
'The odds are stacked even further against QualitySolicitors when you consider that it will take several years for the investment to pay off,' Watkins adds. 'While I agree with QualitySolicitors that some well-known legal brands will emerge in the next few years, actually creating a recognised brand does present an extremely tough challenge. You only have to look at other service industries to see the size of marketing investment that has been needed to put their brands at the forefront of consumers' minds.
'Brand-building is a slow exercise, and the dynamics of the legal industry will further compound this. Consumers only use a solicitor once every five years. It really isn't a level playing field.'
Local group for local people
Filling the chasm between these two big fish are a rapidly multiplying number of minnows '“ keeping a lot quieter but steadily growing in clients and sophistication.
One such firm is Brian McKibbin's Sutton Coldfield-based GetSolicitors, which he describes as the 'antidote' to Quality and Contact. A much smaller network, made up of just one solicitor per town, GetSolicitors plans to get the reputation as a local group for local people. 'We don't buy into the idea that the public want a generic brand; that's what they'll get with ABS,' says McKibbin. 'Solicitors need to engage in conversations with local people. We are about celebrating the individuality of local firms.'
A flat-rate £600 per month membership fee is all they ask for the centralised call centre. 'One thing that firms find annoying is that they pay a lot of money to the likes of QS or Contact Law, who then take 15 per cent of your fee,' says McKibbin, whose wife runs a law firm. 'Firms are uncomfortable with this.'
He hopes this softly-softly approach to franchising will draw in 600 firms by 2014 '“ creaming off those lawyers who are too intimidated or stubbornly autonomous to be absorbed by the likes of QS.
On a high
One firm less keen to talk numbers is HighStreetLawyer.com. It has undeniably snared one of the strongest names in the brand war, but remains in the phoetal phase of its business development.
Run by in-house lawyer Gary Yantin and his nightclub marketing brother Jon, the website has only been live for a matter of weeks and so they won't be pinned down on their exact business strategy. With a skeleton membership of six solicitors firms so far, the group is gearing up to roll out is pilot scheme first. The bullish brothers have a third brain behind the operation in the form of franchise 'guru' Mike Hutter, of British School of Motoring fame. They have singled out firms of fewer than five partners, distancing themselves from QS' target market of medium-sized, city stars.
When asked how they can cope with QS' two-year head start, Jon replies: 'We are not in the same league. We are never going to take out their business '“ it's way ahead of us. And we're not trying to do the same thing as Quality anyway. We think they are really good '“ if I was a firm of that size I'd probably join up.'
QS does in fact have already have a handful of members with fewer than five partners and Holt insists his model does not depend on size, but location. Despite this, the lads at HighStreetLawyer are adamant the town is big enough for the both of them '“ and possibly more. 'We are not positioning ourselves to have rivals. We are positioning ourselves to pick up a particular end of the market. In two to three years' time the high street will look hugely different. Quality will be still be around, and so will a few others. But we are going to be part of that mix in our own space and I'm sure there will be other brands there too.'
Yantin's analogy of choice here is Starbucks. Jon waxes lyrical about the Seattle coffee shop's rise to fame, stressing that nobody would have predicted how many rival brands the high street could house. The pair believe that for the next five years or so, a tussle between three or four brands is likely to drag on before any significant winners can be called.
But is QS quaking in its boots? Of course not. 'I think being established as the first truly recognised household name will be of huge importance,' Holt muses. 'It is a race, trying to be objective, I think we are winning. With 100 visibly branded locations early next year we are a considerable way ahead of any potential competition.'
Embracing the LSA
There is one thing all these firms can agree on, however. The idea that a firm can just hunker down while the high street war rages, only to emerge from its cocoon as a 'bespoke' service feeding client's desires for a traditional, family firm, is not exactly popular.
These guys are the self-appointed innovators, of course, who have embraced the Legal Services Act as much because of the bottom-line business needs as to satisfy their inner-entrepreneur. But there is pretty much no one willing to argue that holding steady can work.
'On the one hand the profession cannot have its head in the sand as much as the perception '“ more than 2,000 firms have now contacted us in the past five months for information about becoming a branded firm, which is a huge portion of the market,' says Holt.
'On the other hand there does remain a shocking degree of complacency about the threats ahead. Most firms have no idea what actually amounts to a niche or bespoke practice and believe that by trying to attract more wealthy clients they are insulating themselves from the threat of the LSA.
'I don't want to be pessimistic. But my view is the threat is grossly underestimated.'