Efficiency as an intrinsic good in legal

One of the best books that I read recently was Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time.

Full disclosure: my colleague and I were coaching clients of Dan’s SaaS Academy at my former company, so I’m a bit of a Dan Martell devotee.

In Buy Back Your Time Martell argues that readers who are seeking to be more effective should focus on the areas that light them up and what make them the most money. Once readers have identified those areas, he encourages them to “buy back” time by outsourcing at the lowest cost possible anything that isn’t in their area(s) of effectiveness.

While I’m grossly oversimplifying it, Martell asserts that a professional who continually applies this “buy back principle” — focusing more and more time on her area of best use while teaching herself how to hire resources to do things she isn’t best suited for — will find greater success more quickly than those who do not implement this “buy back” approach.

This made me wonder, as reading often does: How many legal professionals think this way? And how might the billable hour — arguably an enemy of finding ways to perform lower value tasks more inexpensively — affect the adoption of this idea in the legal sector? For the answer to this question I turned, of course, to social media and posed this question on LinkedIn:

I tagged a few folks in the post to try and get the conversation going, but I was genuinely surprised (and pleased) by the discussion that ensued.

I won’t do justice to everything that was said, nor be able to summarize everything, but here are some of the highlights:

Mike Whelan observed that legal professionals may struggle with the desire to grow in light of the heavy cost of emotional labor that many of them assume. Chas Rampenthal weighed in and asserted that, in effect, the current system wasn’t built to handle efficiency gains. He thinks a new model is required to effectively absorb more sophisticated ideas of efficiency gains. Damien Riehl pushed back a bit on the idea that all legal professionals don’t care about efficiency and separated them into groups. He argues that while one group may appear to care less about efficiency, others care a great deal. Nika Kabiri wisely injected some comments about cognitive biases and the gap between what legal professionals say that they want and what they actually do. Finally, we heard from an actual legal practitioner! Tara Smith, a family lawyer in Minnesota, offered her observations that there is a core group of lawyers who do care about efficiency, and that over time, those who don’t care about efficiency will be weeded out.

Reflecting on this embarrassment of feedback riches helped me refine the thinking behind my original post.

What I was ultimately trying to communicate is this:

Legal professionals who (1) embrace the focus on their highest and best use, and (2) seek to outsource, doing less of things that don’t generate significant value for them, will create significant leverage.

Professionally, the value that they will generate with even an hour of work will far outstrip the amount they can charge an individual client for that hour. In that way, they effectively move beyond the billable hour financially.

Personally, legal professionals that seek efficiency are likely to find work more challenging and more fulfilling.

Finally, globally, they have the chance to make a much more significant impact with their work.

While efficiency is a nice byproduct of buying back one’s time — it may even be the reason that some begin the process of buying back one’s time — the endgame of improved economics, improved personal satisfaction in work, and improved impact are much more significant not only for the legal professional but for society at large.