Long considered remote, law is a verdant opportunity for entrepreneurs.
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A Call for
Legal Entrepreneurship
by Ronald H. Gruner

"The legal industry is a major, new opportunity for entrepreneurs ... law as practiced today is too often inefficient, opaque and independent of traditional market forces. Dissatisfaction both among clients and within the profession is high resulting in widespread, pent-up demand for better approaches."




Paper copies 94 feet high

A Lengthening Shadow
Over the Basic Fairness
of Our Legal System
Expenses from a recent lawsuit analyzed in Anatomy of a Lawsuit

$2,443,068 Spent in total for 7,691 hours billed.

$969,553 Spent for two expert reports totaling 36 pages.

$545,060 Spent for disputes over protected information.

$490,347 Spent for depositions, about $3,900 for each hour of actual deposition.

$374,530 Spent for lawyer to lawyer communications.

$297,099 Spent for court pleadings and legal research.

$93,000 Spent for 12 hours of mediation.

$65,316 Spent for unannounced hourly rate increases over nine months.

$28,102 Spent for photocopies, a stack of paper 94 feet high at ten cents a copy.




"Yet all too often, discovery practices enable the party with greater financial resources to prevail by exhausting the resources of the weaker opponent ... Litigation costs have become intolerable, and they cast a lengthening shadow over the basic fairness of our legal system."

Containing the Cost of Litigation
Rutgers Law Review (1985)

One Good Idea Can Change an Industry

"Although 'Big Law' today is a $100 billion industry, revenue growth is largely based on steadily raising hourly rates, increasing billable hours, lateral recruiting (hiring other firms' lawyers with clients in-trail) and finding rate-insensitive work - none of which benefits the user.

"Can entrepreneurs help evolve the industry as they have in so many other areas?"

A Call for Legal Entrepreneurship

Today the legal industry is similar to the music industry ten years ago. Then the only way to buy music was to purchase a CD for $15 dollars or more, even if you only wanted one song. The industry supported its revenue growth by selling consumers a great deal of music it did not want. Consumers were dissatisfied, but they had no choice.
Until the Apple iPod. For people who love music, Apple's iPod has made music more accessible and more affordable. Today consumers can easily buy a single song of their choice for 99 cents, Tower Records is out of business, and any teenager will tell you no one buys CDs anymore.
The same is true today of the legal industry. Much of what law firms sell today is unneeded and over-priced, yet clients have little choice. But that will ideally change as legal entrepreneurship comes to law.
It just takes one good idea to change an industry.

Provide Transparency and Standardization to Legal Services
There is limited true competition within legal services relative to other industries. Why? Because it is often difficult for purchasers of legal services to make informed choices based on comparing services, results, prices and satisfaction levels.
Most individuals and even many moderately-sized companies have limited needs for legal services. These sporadic users often have neither the means to locate similar users to compare experiences nor the knowledge of how best to evaluate alternatives. The result is that many purchases of legal services are made by very poorly informed consumers.
Judge Louis Brandeis observed that "sunshine is said to be the best disinfectant." Services that shed light on lawyers' services, the true and complete costs of those services, their actual results, and unbiased client satisfaction levels would allow individuals and companies to make better informed purchase decisions.
Provide Case Management Services
Other complex endeavors have long separated creation and management. Architects design buildings, but contractors build them. Engineers design airplanes, but project managers control budgets. Directors manage the actors and writers, but producers manage the directors.

This is not the case for much of law. Even complex cases costing millions, or tens of millions, are today still managed by lawyers with little training or inclination in project management, cost accounting, administration or other skills necessary to bring projects in on-time and budget. With many law firms' drive to increase billable hours, this is unlikely to change soon.
Services that provide clients rigorous project and budget management of their legal projects could help fill this void thereby reducing legal costs and delays.
Provide Judges Neutral Fact-Finding Services
The American system of legal adversaries each employing their own partisan experts is often inefficient, expensive and baffling to the courts.
The continental European model in which judges retain their own neutral experts may be a better approach. Litigants would still retain their own experts if they wish. The mere presence though of respected experts reporting directly to the court would discourage the obfuscation and unproductive conflict that exists in much of today's adversarial discovery.
One good idea can change an industry. So, if you are a young law associate hesitant to follow the traditional path, or an entrepreneur looking for truly fresh opportunities or a partner tired of working for a system badly in need of change, what's holding you back?




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