‘Feasible to have your county court divorce handled by someone based in Cape Town or Mumbai’?? – reminds me of the occasion of a cousin calling me out of the blue trying to get me to ‘do’ her divorce [and ‘do’ her then husband] from Hong Kong! Thanks – but no thanks!

Software went from being a product (for most consumers) to being a service – even at the most basic level. You can see the consumer-level end points of this in the guises of ‘extra level download’ games, constantly updated/incrementally sold operating systems/office applications, and in iPhone applications leveraged through customer lock-in.

Banking, however, became a product-centred sector for consumers and a service-centred sector for businesses and rich people, when it had always been a service for anyone. A standard short-term loan is and has always been a product, in the sense that you sell it once, but mortgaging was a service industry that’s now purely a product industry because people routinely (well, until recently) remortgage. So you only really have the bank’s mortgage ‘service’ as long as the bank’s rate is competitive. But almost everything banks sell to consumers now is a product – all have been commoditised as all are similar and can be broken down into comparable component parts. But things like investments, fund management and all other things that fall into the ‘wealth management’ box are services – because there’s no money in selling services to most of us, just to the moneyed few.

Those are just two examples, but they highlight to me that a) each sector has to work out its own ‘answer’ to the product/service problem and that is most likely to be an approach differentiated by value of customer over time.

Do you want the customer to be valuable over time? If yes, you can still sell product but you need to build in good customer relationship management to make sure that your customer returns, stays loyal. Or you can ‘force’ loyalty through lock-in. Or you can encourage loyalty through packaging other products in with the one you’re selling (commoditising some more and leveraging the near-zero cost of information products (c.f. Susskind)) while selling this approach as a ‘service’.

Or, you can really sell a service. I say litigation, private client work and many other things are inherently ‘services’ because the longevity of the relationship between client and provider is a powerful tool. In commoditisable legal ‘products’, there is only the transaction.

But if all the ‘things’ you actually ‘sell’ a customer are really ‘products’ because of their similarity and inherent one-off natures (a conveyancing transaction; a will; a divorce) then you’re going to have to learn some tricks for other sectors on how to make product sales look and feel like a service.

Either way if ‘tesco law’ is anything like changes in other sectors (and this is something once again you can find in Susskind – but many people wrote about it for other sectors before he did) it will represent an enormous shift in behaviour when it comes to law business that can be turned into product, and not so much in service; however, the service side will be hugely affected while the competition kills off the weaklings. Imho.

PS – re “is it feasible to have your County Court divorce handled by someone based in Cape Town or Mumbai” – yes, I think it is. And it may, even, be inevitable.

What consultation process did they follow? When you say employees were finished do you mean made redundant?

Please call me on 0207 464 8433 at my firm Dale Langley & Co and I will be happy to advise you on this.

Legal assistance by non-law firms will not deal with complex litigation but ‘commodity products’ – Wills, PI/ RTA, conveyance, welfare advice, non-contentious drafting. Paralegals & legal execs are often competent to perform the tasks; while professional & qualified lawyers will be utilised to set-up, manage and oversee the process. Work will be outsourced to other parts of the country/ world for cheaper & more efficient execution.

It is time for the legal profession to jump into the 21st Century.

I agree. Most of the posts on Twitter are complete rubbish – I saw one survey that said 40% of tweets were just babble. My guess would have been approx 95%! Having said that, there is some amusing stuff out there – Charon QC and Oedipus Lex are usually quite good. Stephen Fry’s tweets, I’m afraid to say, are usually not. Have you any favourite follows?