What are you paying for?

Stephen Pratt, CEO and Managing Director of Infosys Consulting, Inc., organizes work around the workers. This approach moves work to workers rather than workers to work. Support and expertise can be piped in by telephone in today’s world by way of the the internet as well as by telephone (now over the internet with VOIP). The real collaborative stuff (the real value that professionals offer), he says, is done at the client’s site.

“There is no reason a client should pay a premium for location (the consultant’s). They should pay a premium for skills. The traditional model of consulting engagements was developed before modern communications: Everyone gets on an airplane and sits in a conference room at the client site.”

Translating his comment, lawyers should get paid for the real value and expertise they bring to the client, not their typing skills when they create their own work product. As a the lead article in the current edition of the American Bar Journal says, the “strategic lawyer” is what clients are looking for; and this kind of lawyer is not easy to find. The strategic lawyer is the counselor, the type of lawyer that used to be the standard of the legal profession before the “explosion” of the 1980’s.

This is the kind of lawyer that needs to return, the kind of lawyer law schools need to developing.

Categorized in: Management