There's a great article at Law.com entitled 'No Shades of Gray in the Commoditization of Law' which does a great job of summarizing an 800 lb. gorilla in the room that apparently most of us haven't had the stomach to discuss in depth.
Wake up everybody! This is happening and there's no going back. Corporations are spending in the billions to essentially change the way we operate on both the legal service provider and law firm organizational level.
I need a timeline here, but this will have to do. Take a look at consolidation and mega corporate takeover in action, only from a LTS / Service Provider standpoint. (Thanks Gartner)
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AccessData — CT Summation (July 2010)
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Altegrity — Kroll (June 2010)
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Anacomp — CaseLogistix (May 2007)
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Autonomy — Zantaz (July 2007), Interwoven (March 2009), CA's information governance assets (June 2010), Iron Mountain (May 2011)
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CA — iLumin (October 2005), MDY Group (June 2006), Orchestria (January 2009)
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Doar Litigation Consulting — Inference Data (April 2010)
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Document Technologies, Inc. (DTI) — Daticon EED (September 2010), Fios (November 2012)
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EED — Daticon (June 2008)
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EMC — Kazeon (September 2009)
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Epiq Systems — Encore Discovery Solutions (May 2011)
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FTI Technology — Ringtail Solutions (February 2005), Attenex (July 2008)
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Guidance Software — CaseCentral (February 2012)
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HP — Autonomy (October 2011)
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Huron Consulting — Aaxis Technologies (August 2006), Trilantic (November 2010)
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IBM — FileNet (August 2006), PSS Systems (October 2010), StoredIQ (February 2013)
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Integreon — Bowne's litigation support business (January 2006), Datum Legal (June 2008), Onsite3 (May 2009)
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Interwoven — Discovery Mining (July 2008)
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Iron Mountain — Stratify (October 2007), Mimosa Systems (February 2010)
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Kroll — TrialGraphix (September 2007)
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LexisNexis — CourtLink (December 2001), Applied Discovery (July 2003), CaseSoft (July 2006), Dataflight Software (July 2006)
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Marsh & McLennan Companies — Kroll (July 2004)
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Océ Business Services — CaseData (October 2006)
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Pitney Bowes — Ibis Consulting (April 2006)
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ProofPoint — Fortiva (June 2008), NextPage (January 2011)
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RenewData — Digital Mandate (August 2009)
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Seagate — MetaLINCS (December 2007) [Has since exited the market]
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Symantec — Veritas (July 2005), Vontu (December 2007), Clearwell Systems (May 2011), LiveOffice (January 2012)
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Thomson Reuters — CaseLogistix, from Anacomp (July 2010)
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Unify — AXS-One (June 2009); merged with Daegis (June 2010)
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Wolters Kluwer — Summation Legal Technologies (December 2004)
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Xerox — Amici (June 2006), Lateral Data (July 2012)
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Xiotech — Daticon (January 2006) [Daticon was later sold to EED]
Corporations like Symantec and HP are too well familiar with the 'Bleeding over Time' effect outside counsel can have when the litigation heat is on. They understand that it makes sense to bring the e-Discovery effort in-house if it's at all possible. Buy an EMC SAN and get Kazeon! Email backup? How about Legal Hold and ECA with Enterprise Vault and Clearwell! Document review at $300 an hour? Smart clients won't pay more than $50, and smarter ones pay around $35.
Dig it.. This is happening and we all have two choices here. Cut the fat and embrace high return flat fee pricing models, as found in Hybrid Hosting and FracLit (plug!) or maintain the status quo and press your luck.
My man Bob Dylan once told me "The Times they are a-changin. "Dont fear it. Embrace it. Theres huge opportunity for players who can be flexible and serve the client with smarter, more cost effective solutions. After all, the price slashing the biggest competitors will have to perform to compete might just put them out of business instead.
