“You can only collaborate successfully when you both know what the end goals are and how you both are going to achieve them.” – Priti Shetty, General Counsel, ICICI Bank UK

Buyers and sellers of legal services share common goals — quality, reliability and value.

It is striking that in our two-sided market, the ‘sell’ is on one side and ‘buy’ on the other. The glib reaction to that would be to conclude that sellers and buyers of legal services have competing interests. The assumption would be that the buyers want to acquire the service cheaply, which is the opposite of how the sellers want to supply it. But those simply aren’t the parameters or the tensions.

The first thing to appreciate is that the real competition is among sellers, not between sellers and buyers. On the sell side, there is an abundance of talented and adept sellers, competing for a limited pool of work, handed out by a sophisticated buying community. With raw demand falling, the reality is that the competitive tension is all focused on law firms as sellers.

Then there is another factor that we need to understand to make sense of this; the buyers of legal services want quality, reliability and value, not cheapness. Look at any legal market in any town and, as we all know, there will be an array of sellers with a wide range of rates and fee arrangements. Now look where the work goes, it certainly doesn’t congregate around the cheapest.

And finally, one more thing that we all know but bears repetition: Quality, reliability and value are precisely what the sellers of legal services aspire to offer, not price.

Of course, in every market there will be an unenlightened minority on both sides of the market. So too with legal services. But, in the vast majority of cases, the interests of sellers and buyers are complementary, not competing. This is why the term ‘partnering’ is commonly used as an aspiration in the GC community.