Catch22: should we make legal advice 'good' or easy?
Sometimes we can't have both
Back in the eighties Sony and JVC battled it out over the new “home video recording” market. Sony had created the technically superior Betamax. JVC had developed VHS.
All tests showed Betamax was better - superior video and sound, and also smaller tapes compared to VHS.
But.. VHS machines were easier to produce and buy. So they were cheaper, and more brands made them as JVC had licensed the tech to the wider marketplace.
By the late 1980s VHS had won, controlling over 90% of the market. And Sony reluctantly started making their own VHS machines in 1988.
The take away? It ain’t no good having the best product if you’re out of business.
Legal advice can be similar. No point in drafting an advice memo with the most perfect analysis, if your commercial stakeholder never reads it.
[Side point: I sometimes joke that the main difference between lawyers and the rest of the world is the lawyer’s ability to start reading a long boring piece of text, and just keep going until it’s done. But for most people, “TLDR” is a real thing!]
Sometimes it’s easy: shortening the memo increases the readability and quality. In that case there’s no excuse.
This post is about the other times though, when you do lose meaning. Where in order to get someone to read it, you have to leave something out that you think is meaningful.
Betamax couldn’t bring themselves to go there. They cared about their quality, and in order to deliver that, they simply couldn’t drop the price. But ultimately the market decides.
Most software products these days have a similar trade-off: include features that are important and valuable for a trained and onboarded user? Or leave them out and optimise to make things easier for a first time user?
Most fast growing software products ultimately need to optimise for the first time user in order to keep growing.
E.g. Slack decided to have just 1 text box. They could’ve required a user to also put in a subject line, similar to email. That would make staying on top of your Slack messages a LOT easier for everybody (you could scan, instead of need to read everything). But, it would make it harder on first use. As most folks would prefer to just word vomit what they have to say!
Anyway, as lawyers we need to get emotionally comfortable with this trade-off. Even if it goes against our professional pride. Got to deal with the world as it is, not as we feel it should be!
Thanks for being here,
Daniel
P.S. If you need help with any of these things, we’d love to help out :-)
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