Hard to believe that more than 11 years have transpired since my partner-boss Press Millen (known for his perpetual perch on the leading edge) and I distributed a memo encouraging lawyers to help us develop legal products. In the wake of presentations by @RichardSusskind and @SimonThompson at the @LexMundi Annual Meeting in May, we rummaged through our files to resurrect it. Here is one excerpt from that January 23, 2002 FAQ memo specifying the 6 P’s of legal services product development Makes us look like later day HG Wellses.

“What sorts of services are good candidates for becoming a product offering?

There’s no hard and fast rule. Anything that you have done or could do more than once could be a product. (This includes litigation.) We are limited only by our lack of imagination and creativity. In our experience, though, product offerings perform better in the marketplace as they get closer to meeting the following characteristics. Products:

• can be Pitched (they are easy to describe in sound bites on the phone)
• can be Promoted (it’s easy to communicate with PR, brochures, etc. what we do and what the benefits will be)
• have a differentiated market Position (e.g. unique, proprietary, better, faster, cheaper)
• are Packageable (we can put them in a binder or the electronic equivalent) for distribution to others within the firm
• utilize a predetermined engagement Plan
• have a specific deliverable Product (a report, a finding, a result, a filing)
• are Priced uniformly (by project, percentage of savings).

I still believe that relationships are critical. I also believe that we will see legal products rising in importance in the legal marketers’ toolkit very, very quickly indeed.