I argue that there are only two responses to the more for less dilemma. The first is what I call the “efficiency strategy,” which involves cutting the costs of legal service. More specifically, I call for the “decomposition” of legal work into component tasks, the more routine and repetitive of which should be undertaken in ways that are much more efficient than the methods of traditional, one-to-one consultative advisers who handcraft and charge by the hour. This leads us into a world of off-shoring, outsourcing, subcontracting, near-shoring, and computerizing the process-based and more administrative work clients are no longer willing to pay to be done by expensive lawyers in expensive buildings. In summary, this is the industrialization, digitization, and commoditization of legal service.

If law firms do not like the efficiency strategy, I expect GCs to default to my alternative—the “collaboration strategy.” In fact, they may embrace this strategy even if firms do come to work differently. Enabled by a range of social media, the collaboration strategy entails clients coming together and sharing the costs of legal services. Unlikely though this may sound, the approach is already gaining traction. If we cannot cut costs, the only way to save is to share the costs. And so, there are major corporations, financial institutions, and public bodies in the United Kingdom and the United States that are exploring ways in which they might isolate common legal and compliance work that is noncompetitive and invite one legal supplier to syndicate its offerings to this community, perhaps working through some low-cost service center.

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