Riverview Law is the third company I‘ve helped set-up in 23 years. In each case my team and I have picked the right market at the right time -- technology training and recruitment in 1989, human resources advisory outsourcing in 2000, and legal advice for businesses in 2011.
With Riverview Law we set out to create a legal services organisation that aims to change the way businesses buy, use and measure legal services. Traditionally law firms look at their costs and work out how many billable hours are required to generate a profit.
We started from a different point, the customer. We analysed what was important to small, medium and large businesses. We then set about building a different, cost-effective, service delivery model that combined people and technology appropriately, solving the  ‘ticking clock’ problem businesses have with law firms by bringing transparency and certainty through fixed price annual and multi-year contracts.

Feeling the opportunities

However, the legal market has shocked me and my colleagues in a way that the previous two markets we entered didn’t – and some of the shocks have been pleasant.
The market opportunity is much bigger than we realised -- and we thought it was big. Riverview Law has gained much quicker traction than our two previous businesses; less than two months since launch we can really touch and feel the opportunity. Customers want change.
Yet nothing could have prepared us for some of the comments and behaviour we’ve witnessed from within the legal profession. In any market, like attracts like, so on the positive side we‘ve been delighted with the approaches from people who want to join us, businesses that want to partner with us, customers who want to work with us and commentators who have constructively challenged our analysis and made us rethink parts of our model.
But there have been some surprising themes. For example, why do some lawyers comment anonymously on legal websites? The response ‘stand-up and be counted or shut-up’ comes to mind, but the nature and tone of some of these comments is also worrying. Many tend to be wholly petty and introspective, begging the question: would you want to be represented by these professionals?
These anonymous lawyers do a massive disservice to the profession and the many great lawyers practising in it. They add to the need and desire for change amongst customers. They assist the battle cry of entrants.

We’ve also been surprised by how many lawyers have said they would be happy to see us fail. Clearly, we’re a nasty business, solely interested in profit, and not the ethical bulwarks of the profession that they are.
Really? Law firms don’t make excess profits? The hourly billing model is in the interests of customers, I suppose, and not partners?

Raising the game

In other markets we saw people raise their games and compete with entrants to the benefit of customers. I’m sure many lawyers and law firms will also do so. However, nothing could have prepared us for a letter to the American Bar Association’s ‘Commission on Ethics 20/20’, which was jointly signed by nine US general counsel.
In summary, the letter boldly states that proposals for any form of mixed legal disciplinary practice in the US should be stifled at birth. And that moves towards alternative business structures, such as those recently implemented in England, would ‘[open] the door to arrangements that make the practice of law more like other businesses and less like the distinct profession it has always been’.
When we first read the letter we thought it was a spoof. When we realised it wasn’t, it struck us that it is a watershed moment.
In 10 years commentators will look back and draw connections between alternative business structures, entrants to the legal sector, changing customer demand, lawyer complacency, and this (by then) infamous letter, and identify 2012 as the year the market really started to change. The nine GCs have unwittingly played as significant a part in escalating this change as law firms do by publishing their profit-per-equity partner figures, thus demonstrating to clients the excess profits they make.
The letter also made me think about the first meeting between any of those in-house lawyers and their chief executive once the latter has read the letter. Oh to be a fly on the wall.
If I were that chief executive, my first question would be: ‘Tell me, what were you thinking when you signed this letter?’; and my final observation would be ‘I’ve asked the chief financial officer to conduct a review of our in-house and third-party legal spend over the last three years’.

Karl Chapman is chief executive of London-based law firm Riverview Law