In 1972, Leonard Jacoby and Steve Meyers, former classmates at UCLA Law, came up with a novel idea. Create a law firm to serve the middle class, the nice folks who were priced out of the legal market but still needed a lawyer. It was revolutionary.
They did things no one else had every done. They advertised. They charged flat fees. They used computers. But the soul of their venture was to do something no one had ever done before, or wanted to do before: be the lawyers for the middle-class. The catchphrase, “It’s about time,” referred to the notion that there were finally lawyers regular people could afford. It was brilliant.
The idea may seem obvious today, but it was audacious and outrageous at the time. Initially, it was very successful, and soon there were 150 offices, primarily located on both coasts. They handled the full panoply of normal legal work, from wills to criminal, the sort of law that regular folks needed. The “new normal” was born.
But it gave birth to the idea that lawyers could provide mediocre legal work for lower fees, and tap a new market of people who couldn’t afford top notch lawyers with exorbitant fees. Suddenly, there were 10,000 lawyers charging lower rates, and offering generic services, for the everyman. And they started to fight when the money got tight, and they just didn’t count on the tears.
By the mid-1990s, in response to competitive pressures, the firm retrenched to 150 attorneys from a high of 330 and stopped handling many of the ordinary personal bankruptcy, real estate closings, uncontested divorces and will preparation that had been its bread and butter following the firm’s formation, but which had faced a market saturated with lawyers and law firms that adopted many of the innovations that Jacoby & Meyers had introduced, accepting credit card payments, charging flat fees and using computer systems to track cases. By 1994 the firm’s television advertising spending dropped to $2.3 million annually, down from their spending peak at $6.4 million in 1988. The firm shifted its focus to age discrimination, consumer fraud, product liability and sexual harassment, where litigation was more lucrative.
When was the last time you heard a Jacoby & Meyers commercial tout that it’s the firm for the middle-class? The it charged flat fees rather than hourly? Its catchphrase today is “winning cases since 1972.”
There are no shortage of legal futurists and social media gurus who are working overtime to sell us on the “new normal.” Except it’s not quite new, and it was only normal until it died of natural causes. There are no shortage of hungry lawyers hoping there is a magic formula that will save them from starvation and taking that assistant manager job at Dairy Queen. It’s a tough market out there.
When you’re drowning, you’ll grab at anything you think will keep you afloat, even if experience shows that it isn’t as buoyant as it seems.
The experiment of Jacoby and Meyers taught three lessons. There is a market for legal services in the middle class, but while they want to pay as little as possible, they still expect quality legal representation. The model of pay less, get less, wasn’t “about time.”
The model was capable of providing subsistence level income to lawyers, which is better than starvation. But most lawyers hope to eventually plant themselves firmly in the middle class, home ownership, new car, feed their children most nights. That sort of thing. The model wasn’t sufficient to get them there.
But the most important lesson is that every new idea, to the extent it might have any viability, will collapse under its own weight as the market becomes saturated. If someone is selling you the idea, they are also selling it to every other hungry lawyer. It might work for one. It won’t work for all.
My pal, Pat Lamb, writes about the New Normal at the ABA’s silly Legal Rebels blog. His latest post is that we’re not special. He refers to the dictates of economics, though he omits from the equation the constraints and obligations that distinguish lawyers. Still, he has a point. Lawyers are as much victims of economics as anyone else.
The laws of economics haven’t changed much since Jacoby and Meyers were friends. Normal hasn’t gotten any newer. Even if it works for you for a while, it doesn’t mean you won’t meet the same end as J&M. There is no magic bullet.
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Thanks for posting this Scott. I’ve been thinking about similar issues for a long time – how the issues that we see today aren’t really the new normal, but the old routine. As you point out, today’s “branded law firms” or “Legal Zoom” affiliates are really just Jacoby & Meyers 2.0 Many (but not all) of the virtual law firms today are what we used to call “fly by night attorneys” back when I started my practice (and mind you, not all fly by night lawyers were awful – but they just seemed shady, walking around in sweat pants or working from home basement offices). While I’m not as pessimistic that every new idea will be copied or collapse under its own weight, I’m also not willing to applaud every new idea under the sun when it’s been done before.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different outcome, then it’s important that us older lawyers provide some institutional memory so that the newer ones don’t hurt their heads banging into walls.
There are new ideas, and better executions, and the internet has certainly changed things, though I’m not sure whether it’s for better or worse. But at a time when empty adjectives replace critical thinking, and is supported by so many pillars of the legal community, it’s important that we not forget that many “Legal Rebel”-y ideas are nothing new, and are no more likely to work this time than they did last time.