Thursday, February 28, 2008

Business ideas



I've got two ideas for a business that someone needs to start doing immediately. First, someone needs to start outsourcing lawyer work. New lawyers frequently gripe about the kind of work that they are forced to do. They end up getting locked in a closet with boxes of documents and are forced to read all of them and sift through all of that information looking for the useful bits. A huge part of a lawyer's job is finding and organizing useful information for more expensive lawyers.

A lot of this work can be done overseas. Imagine of someone started scanning in all of those documents, sending them to India, getting all of the information sifted and then getting a nice, clean, report back. Smart law firms may even keep it in house so they could keep their billable hours high, but they could charge substantially less for the hours of Indian labor while keeping their margins the same.

Some people might argue that this would make all of those new lawyers obsolete, but I doubt it. Instead, that skilled labor force would be switched to more value adding tasks (analyzing and applying all of that aggregated information) - most of which are far more intellectual stimulating. Costs come down, more sophisticated legal representation becomes available for smaller costs, the whole system runs better and lawyers aren't so pissed about their work conditions. It's a win all the way around.

Second, someone needs to put a driving range and some tennis courts in a gym with a day care. If I could take Booker for a couple of hours and go hit a bucket of balls or play some tennis while someone else watches him I would get to the gym way more often. You could still charge me extra for the buckets, or include it in the monthly fee, or some mix of the two. It seems like such a small thing to combine those two individually successful business models. Plus, if husbands can take the little kids to go practice golf or tennis or something, then everyone's happier.

Someone give me some money and let's make this happen.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hmmmmmm. When your ass is on the line for malpractice, do you trust a person who only speaks English as a second language and whose education level you don't know, or would you rather trust someone who has proven they can get through an American law school? Malpractice is far more expensive than paying a Junior Associate, especially since you can transfer that cost to clients as billable hours.