OMGā¦ I have so many thoughts / rants. 
Iām going to answer conceptually AND concretely.
- In legal buy, we try to swap the mutual trust required for stable institutional relationships function with stuff that intrinsically ERODES trust (increasingly granular contractual obligations followed by increasingly invasive administrative monitoring + enforcement). Clients do this to outside firms, and firms are doing this to partners, fee earners and staff. This is going in the wrong direction.
- We confuse āmore expedient for me nowā with ābetter for everyone foreverā without regard to second- and third-order impacts and unintended harm.
- We bolt on new requirements, processes, tech, programs, initiatives, and priorities without rationalizing/refactoring what exists.
Examples of how this manifests.
Convergence and volume discounts.
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Itās true clients would benefit from a rationalized legal supply chain of fewer providers overall. But first-gen (and many current-gen) efforts are geared at exactly that without too much rigor on optimal coverage. One-stop (or fewer-stop) shopping for #legal services I think has created skewed incentive for law firms to seek safety in size and breadth. As a result many law firms now have expanded geographic footprint, practice lineup, and industry coverage. Also, many law firms now say (in their marketing) that they do everything for everyone. This isā¦ bad for clients because that means that now more law firms are doing stuff that theyāre not great at.
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As against that backdrop, volume discounts are bad for both clients and firms. The current year spend reduction might be expedient for some individuals on the client side who need to hit those targets. But theyāre bad for optimizing the effectiveness and the performance of the supplier network. They create adverse incentives for in-house counsel who are economic buyers to choose suboptimal providers. They create adverse incentives for law firms to continue diffusing their focus in areas where theyāre not disadvantaged. This creates more noise in the market and makes credence goods harder to buy.
Outside counsel guidelines. These are getting more complicated, stringent and granular; and often written in a way that enables clients to unilaterally impose punitive measures / consequences for non-compliance. Theyāre also fragmented across the market because so many clients customize how administrative tasks need to be done (tech can help here, but this is a problem that doesnāt need to exist or be so bad). In practice, this lets clients impose additional discounts as penalties without a forcing function for any conversation with suppliers. This is bad for firms bc of immediate revenue leakage, but itās bad for both clients and firms because it exponentially explodes administrative burden on both sides. Instead of picking up the phone, voicing concerns about a matter and asking for an adjustment off the invoice, billing guidelines basically generate up to 100 adjustments at the time entry level for (a) someone at the supplier to review and maybe contest; (b) someone at the client to review appeals and respond. This is not a functional way for large scale institutions to transact business. Basically, we are grafting digitalization to the billing process without appropriate refactoring of what existed before: time as atomic unit of value and time entry descriptors of that value written by humans for humans to read. For e-billing to really deliver on its potential, we need to rethink AT MINIMUM how providers can generate time entries (combining human effort + tech) that computers can read/process.
I could go on forever but these are top of mind.
OMG I love this question bc it asks what the practical implications of high-risk/high-reward strategy might be in time to ROI and size of the prize.
Competition occurs in context so Iāll answer by segment.
For incumbent law firms this is a really difficult endeavor overall. Current position isnāt destiny but the current state does create both opportunities and constraints. Really hard questions for firms to ask and answer in the current data environmentā¦ (a) how diffuse is the current industry focus across the installed client base & (b) how revenue-dependent is each firm in industries that might be non-core in future and might need shedding? For some firms, shifting the locus of strategic planning from location and practice to client industries will be really hard. Physical location is where major capex like real estate is managed; law is a people business so it makes sense for the firm to think in a firm-centric way about practice-led approaches. Talent is both the big-ticket cost line as well as where critical strategic investments are made.
Soā¦ it is a long bake for law firms ā longer for some than others. I think the 
hard questions cited above to rationalize the client base. But it also usually means acquiring your way into client segments by sector, which will mean lateral hires. Because a 3-year guarantee is pretty typical for marquee lateral hires and lateral onboarding takes about 6-12 months, the second horizing (2-5 years) sounds right to me for this type of GTM to fully bear fruit.
For relatively newer entrants like ALSPs, the time to value for industry-focused GTM will be much, much, much faster. They are smaller and can make growth bets without a brain-scrambling exercise on how forward-looking strategy overlays onto the current client and service line portfolio. Iād say 12 months.
The answer for Big 4 is less clear. They have some of the advantages of ALSPsā¦ but they inherit a ton of similar strategy diffusion from globally yuge service and business lines across tax, audit and advisory. Last I checked, Big 4 collective audit all but 1 of the Fortune 500 and audit independence is an impenetrable conflicts barrier. The same relationship / turf dynamics that plague large law firms apply to Big 4 advisory businesses and will likely apply in equal or greater force to their foray into legal. If any one of the Big 4 threads this needle optimally I still think GTM horizon is 2-5 years.
As to permanence/transience of the underlying performance dispersionā¦ this is probably shifting toward shorter cycles (e.g. getting more transient). BUT for the firms that REALLY, REALLY nail industry focus, the financial rewards are vast and the competitive advantages are actually very durable, although ongoing stewardship + strategy refreshes will be needed.
and not a global financial conglomerate 
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Existentially though, the shift to industry focus hints at an important shift in management ethos: being demand-led (e.g. client-centric and market-oriented) rather than supply-driven (e.g. lawyer-centric and firm-oriented). This is really, really, really, really hard but it has lots of strategic implications on brand + pricing position.
Thank you for reading and for your kind comments always.
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Saved the hardest questions for last 
all my startups equallyā¦
Thank you for being open to this viewpoint. You are a 
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insight with the community and starting so many thought-provoking conversations. 
