TL;DR: A flaw in the “one firm for everything” law firm model is that companies are often pushed to specialist lawyers that they aren’t a good fit for, or simply don’t like. The boutique law firm ecosystem delivers far more flexibility for startups to work with specialist lawyers better suited for their specific cultures and needs.

Background Reading:

• Startups Need Specialist Lawyers
• Checklist for Choosing a Startup Lawyer
• The problem with chasing whales. 

The core value proposition behind what we’ve been building at E/N over the past several years is this: new legal technology has removed the hegemony once held by large, all-purpose law firms over the high-end of the legal market; enabling an ecosystem of specialized boutiques to replicate the kind of full service that 500-1,000 lawyer firms provide, yet far more flexibly and efficiently.

Parsing that out requires a bit of backstory:

Scaling technology companies have always needed many different kinds of lawyers: corporate, commercial, tax, employment, litigation, patent, data privacy, etc. Historically, getting all of those lawyers to effectively share information and collaborate was virtually impossible without having all of them under the same firm. The cost of building and running a law firm was simply too high in terms of infrastructure, and cross-firm collaboration carried a lot of friction.

Unneeded Infrastructure

So in that old world, if you were building any kind of serious tech company, you effectively had to go to BigLaw. Running a BigLaw firm is extremely expensive: high-end real estate with top shelf furnishings, file rooms, libraries, in-house IT, lavish summer intern programs, layers of administrative staff, etc. When you have a BigLaw attorney $750+/hr, maybe 20-25% of that is paying for the attorney. The rest is funding all the infrastructure of the firm.

E/N’s position is that a very large portion of the tech ecosystem does not, and very likely never will, need that “infrastructure,” and therefore should not be paying for it. So we take the partners and other attorneys from those firms, cut their rates by hundreds of dollars an hour, and put them on a significantly leaner platform. The end-result is that, on average, early-stage/middle-market companies get better lawyers, at lower rates, and with much better responsiveness.

Flexibility in Specialist Selection

But while efficiency and responsiveness are a big part of E/N’s value prop, flexibility is another that is worth emphasizing, because it touches on a problem that companies often run into when choosing to work with a very large firm.

If you hire a “startup lawyer” (corporate) at a large firm, that firm’s business model is premised on cross-selling all of its specialties. So if while working with your corporate lawyer, a labor law issue, or a patent law issue, comes up, he/she is almost certainly going to refer it internally within the same firm. We’ve seen time and time again that this dynamic causes major headaches for many entrepreneurs.

Why? Because lawyers are people (not software), and law firms are service businesses (not product companies). Once you move past the template-ized aspects of very early-stage legal, the individual personalities, culture, and processes of the lawyers you work with have a very large impact on the end-product you get. You can have half a dozen patent lawyers, all with impeccable credentials and similar academic backgrounds, and yet the way that they each work and interact with clients is fundamentally different. And because lawyers are so different, there is every reason to expect that your particular company may simply “fit” better with one, and not “fit” at all with another.

So a fundamental flaw with the “one firm for everything” law firm model is that it very often pushes startups to work with lawyers that they simply don’t like, or aren’t a good fit for. Not only do entrepreneurs often hate this approach, but many startup lawyers hate it too, because they themselves would prefer their clients find appropriate specialists. When I was in BigLaw, I saw first-hand how startups often got pushed to patent lawyers (just as an example) who made absolutely no sense – from a pricing and technical background standpoint – for a particular company, but the startups nevertheless felt stuck with the lawyers they were sent to.

At E/N, we get exactly zero kick-backs / referrals fees when we connect one of our clients to an outside lawyer via our heavily curated specialist network. Sticking to the patent lawyer example, when a client needs patent assistance, we (i) first emphasize that we don’t do patents and don’t want to (we’re focused), and (ii) provide a list of options that, based on the company’s stage, culture, and type of technology, would be a good fit for them, and then we either make a referral or let the company conduct their own diligence, if they want to. 

Flexibility + Focus maximizes quality and “fit”

Many specialist lawyers (including in BigLaw) can be quite entrepreneurial, but by being part of firms that service 25+ different practice areas, they are institutionally constrained to a minimal level of focused optimization; in the exact same way that large conglomerate companies end up being mediocre at a lot, and excellent at very little.

How do startups take on companies 100x their size? By picking a specific segment / product offering and owning it.  That’s precisely what the boutique law firms in E/N’s specialist ecosystem are doing. By narrowing their focus, building targeted infrastructure and cutting out the irrelevant, they’re able to optimize for companies that need exactly what they deliver, and ignore everyone else. And by connecting with lawyers like those at E/N, they get merit-based referrals to ensure the companies they work with are a good “fit” for them.

I’m not bearish on BigLaw at all; at least not the truly high end portion of it. Billion-dollar companies doing complex cross-border deals needing 10 different kinds of lawyers to collaborate on a single project very quickly are almost certainly in BigLaw’s sweet spot, and that’s not going to change any time soon. At the same time, we’re seeing a growing exodus of non-unicorns toward the more flexible, efficient, and focused boutique ecosystem that is better designed for their needs. We’re enjoying being near the center of it.