Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts on the what, why, and how of subscription legal services. You can find our first post, “What are subscription legal services?” here. Our second post, "The 'why' of subscription legal services (Part 2)," is here. The third post, The ethics of subscription legal services (Part 3), is here. We at Confido Legal recently launched a suite of tools that make it easy to offer subscription-based legal services. If you'd like to learn more about the tools we’ve built, contact us.
We also have three episodes of our Financially Legal podcast featuring lawyers who have built and now offer subscription-based legal services. Check out those episodes with Jon Tobin, Beth Lebowitz, and Kimberly Bennett. You can also hear Megan Zavieh and me discuss the ethics of subscription-based legal services on her Financially Legal podcast episode.
Overview
If you have decided to move forward with a subscription-based legal plan, your mind is probably swimming with possibilities. What services should you include? Should there be different tiers of service? Will existing clients want to move over to the new model?
Better yet, where do the limits on the new service end? Does this present an opportunity for upsells? And finally, do you need to take any steps to protect yourself and your firm before you launch?
Like any new and exciting entrepreneurial venture, the questions and possibilities stretch as far as your imagination can take them. But you’ll also want to rein in that out-of-control imagination and sketch out a minimum viable product that excites your users, delivers enough to retain subscribers, and yet does not absorb so much of your time as to make the model untenable or unprofitable.
So where do you start? We will walk through many of the above questions, as well as the planning steps of developing a launchable product.
Prepare for Liftoff by Designing Your Product
Excited? Ready to jump in and start offering subscriptions?
Before you do, you need to plan. The first thing to consider is the scope of your subscription offering. If you’ve read our prior posts in this series, you know that the fear of being overwhelmed by a flood of work from subscription clients is one reason some lawyers and law firms hesitate with subscriptions. This risk can absolutely be managed, but it’s important to take the time to consider what you want to include as part of your subscription offering - what’s “inside” and what’s “outside” your subscription “box.”
- Client interviews: One way to get a good sense of this is to conduct client interviews. What kinds of questions do clients ask you? What kinds of questions aren’t they asking you because they don’t want to be charged for it? If they did have ongoing access to you, what might they want? Really understanding what your clients want is an important first step.
- Quick and easy: No matter your practice area, there are certain activities that are labor-intensive, and there are other quickie things you can handle in 10 minutes flat. Focus your subscription legal services plan on offering these quick tasks at a rate that makes sense for you and your clients.
- Structure your offering: Using the information from your interviews and your thinking about quick, easy activities, you should be able to start outlining your offering. Look at what you put together and ask yourself realistically if these are the services that you are prepared to offer as part of your subscription.
Once you have a grasp of your offering, you may want to consider separating it into multiple pricing tiers. After all, one size rarely fits all. Some firms definitely do not do this — Jon Tobin’s Counsel for Creators only offers a single $ 95-per-month plan for unlimited phone calls and document reviews. On the other hand, Willie Peacock’s QDRO subscription for legal professionals includes two tiers: a base plan that covers calls, consultations, and retirement plan research, and a higher tier that offers unlimited drafted court orders. And we’d be remiss not to mention Erin Levine’s HelloDivorce, a start-up that sprang out of a traditional family law firm that offers four tiers of service to its consumer clients - from a basic software-only package to higher tiers with drop-in assistance from legal professionals.
Next up are the terms. Now that you know which services to include, you need to draft the subscription agreement, highlighting the key terms and limits in your marketing materials and on your website. Make sure your terms of service include termination terms as well. You want to be able to deal effectively with problem clients, nonpaying clients, and similar situations. If you need inspiration or guidance on structuring your terms, many of the services we’ve mentioned in this series have their terms on their respective sites.
You will also need to line up your tools. We won't cover that here, but we’ll delve deeper into it in the next post.
Build Your Resource Kit
To justify your recurring subscription cost, avoid issues with unconscionable fee agreements when clients fail to use your legal services (we discussed this problem in post #3 in this series), and to differentiate your subscription legal services offering, many subscription law firms also include a bank of online tools and resources for subscribers - ebooks, webinars, and calculators are examples of these tools. Adding these tools will reduce subscriber churn and may actually reduce the amount of time your subscribers need your in-person help.
Here are some examples of existing subscription legal services offerings that provide these additional tools and resources to their clients:
- Lawyer Jess Birken’s Mission Guardian Subscription for non-profits includes forms and policies as part of her offering.
- Jon Tobin’s Creator’s Legal Program includes videos and other subscriber-only content.
- A quick internet search for examples of firms offering subscription legal services turned up a fair number of results. While we can’t vouch for these firms, at least from the outside, these offerings look compelling:
- J Eshman Law offers a legal newsletter, an annual estate plan review, and a real estate transaction review for her subscribers.
- Aiden Durham’s 180 Law Co offers registered agent services along with some other services as part of its subscription offerings.
If you are going to offer these evergreen resources, you’ll need to build or create them before launch. Consider including tools that are regularly used, such as online calculators, educational and reference materials, and forms.
Redesign Your Law Firm Systems
Most law firms are built to bill slowly, by the hour, not for efficiency or volume. To shift to a subscription business model, you will need to rethink how you deliver your service. This may include adopting document automation, proactive client communication systems, billing systems, and other systems. These tools and others like them will be addressed in the next installment of our series on subscription legal services.
Tools aside, you should consider whether you need to set up additional firm infrastructure before launching your subscription service in order to avoid administrative overwhelm. Tobin, for example, spent a solid two months building systems and coding to prepare for the launch of his firm’s subscription service, automating much of the rote background work that drowns out lawyers’ days with “admin time.” Depending upon practice and your offering, you may not need to do something that complex, but thinking about how you may need to shift your workload to associates, paralegals, or legal assistants, considering whether you need a receptionist (virtual or in person), and exploring a new practice management or lead generation system may be appropriate.
The Best Clients Are Ones You Already Have
There is an old saying in business development: the best clients are the ones you already have. First, if they are current clients, they are probably happy with you. Beyond that, current clients represent an opportunity for additional revenue without significant additional marketing expenditures or sales efforts.
But do these existing clients represent a potential base for your new subscription service? Interestingly, Tobin reports that very few of his clients were interested in switching to his subscription service when he launched it, despite invitations. Our conversations with Jeff Birken revealed the same, even after she explained to them that they'd likely be ahead on the money if they made the switch. You may need to consider that your existing clients won’t want to access your services on a subscription basis.
You may also be concerned that moving your existing clients to a subscription might result in revenue loss as they consume your hourly work at a new subscription rate. Of course, you don’t have to offer your subscription plan to your existing clients, especially when you’re just starting out and testing it. But as you consider opening it up, remember you can fine-tune your offering so it works for your business before opening it to everyone.
That said, the most overlooked benefit of a subscription-based law firm is that your pool of subscribers is not only a recurring source of subscription revenue, but also a source for potential larger matters and upsells. Ideally, whether a subscription client is new to you or one you’ve had since before your subscription offering, whenever that client has a need that goes beyond the limited services that are included in the subscription, the first lawyer that they are going to call is you — the person they have an existing relationship with.
As we’ve discussed above, build your legal subscription plan around minor services and consultations. Then be sure to draft the terms of your legal subscription plan to reflect those boundaries. That way, you can offer to handle other matters that generate substantial billable hours - and should not be offered for a few hundred dollars per month - as an upsell to existing subscription clients. You can even build a discount on larger matters into your subscription offering so that subscription clients feel they’re getting a good deal.
The Real First Step is Launching
With all the talk of planning and most lawyers being extremely risk-averse, your biggest trap is waiting indefinitely to launch in favor of planning, planning, and more analysis, leading to more planning. While there are certainly some steps you should take before launching, such as ensuring you have a viable product and clear terms of service, don’t let fear of the unknown or a torrent of unanswered questions and possibilities prevent you from taking action.
Something tech startups often learn is that you have to move fast, launch a minimum viable product, and improve incrementally and rapidly. Applied to legal subscription services, that means putting together a few resources as part of your subscription, outlining the basic terms, and signing a couple - but maybe only a couple - clients to start gathering data so that you can iterate and improve based on your needs and the needs of your clients.
In other words, launch.
The next question you’re asking is likely about tools. The good news is that you don’t have to build it all from scratch - we’ll look at tools to jumpstart and run your subscription service in our next post on subscription legal services.
Going Forward
Read Part 5: Tools for your subscription legal services offering or download our in-depth subscription legal services white paper, which combines this 5-part series into one digestible guide and includes bonus tips and suggestions.
