I’ve had the opportunity to meet with several attorneys attempting to run a virtual practice via a website and portal. In my firm, we are also experimenting with selling services online. There seems to be great interest on the part of attorneys in the concept of running a virtual firm and delivering services via phone, e-mail, and a web portal rather than conducting business in a traditional office.
I think it’s a great idea.
Unfortunately, most of the attorneys buying into the concept miss something important when they evaluate the likelihood of success of a virtual practice. They get caught up in the cool technology: the bells and whistles and the shiny objects. The thing they’re missing gets short shrift from the vendors selling the back-end services. No one is focusing on marketing.
Most attorneys interested in a virtual practice get excited about the possibilities of generating lots of revenue via the Internet and fail to think about the likelihood of actually selling the service. The vendors are thrilled to sell their hosted product and aren’t going to raise any negatives. They’re in the business of selling to lawyers, not to clients.
One of the vendors claims it offers “Everything You Need to Practice Law” in its promotional material. I beg to differ. In fact, I think the online platform is the least significant part of what you need to practice law. The web platform is a trivial part of selling your services. It’s easier to get a web platform than it is to rent an office space. Both are equally insignificant to your ultimate success: they just don’t matter very much.
What you need is clients—good clients. Having a virtual office doesn’t magically bring clients to your virtual door. In fact, in many practice areas, I don’t think there’s much demand among clients for a virtual practice. A virtual lawyer isn’t what most clients are thinking of as the solution to their problem. If they want something virtual, they’re perfectly happy with services like LegalZoom. In fact, I’ve seen a survey indicating that many clients prefer a paralegal-provided service to an attorney-provided service, even when both are offered at the same price.
If you’re going to run an online practice, you’ve first got to figure out where the clients are going to come from. That’s the most important piece of the puzzle.
I don’t entirely blame the sellers of these hosted services for leading lawyers down the path to opening unsuccessful virtual practices. The fact is that most of them refer to marketing in their sales pitch. They’re willing to talk through those issues with lawyers seeking advice. Unfortunately, most lawyers getting excited about a virtual practice aren’t all that interested in the marketing part of it. They don’t slow down long enough to ask about the marketing or the customer demand.
Most of the virtual lawyers I’ve met buy the website first and only talk to me when they realize they aren’t making any money. What they need to do is figure out the client generation element first and then open the virtual practice. Don’t put the cart in front of the horse.
In some practice areas, virtual practices might be a great idea. Just be careful that you aren’t building a service delivery system for something that doesn’t have prospective clients. Clients first, platform second.
