We have a profound professional and economic interest in enhancing the scope and quality of our practices any Web way we can. But we tend to be better imitators than we are innovators, and we have always dwelt on the monkey-do end of the spectrum when it comes to boldly going on the Web where no lawyer has gone before. Lawyers have imitated merchants in using the Web to sell services or market themselves. What we have overlooked is the great benefit that the Web affords attorneys is not in quantifying their services in the marketplace, but in qualifying lawyers for the fang and tooth professional competition to come. The traditional means of marketing legal skills for the great and small lawyers are collapsing around our ears.
Firms mean nothing, geography means nothing, old-school ties mean nothing.
The burgeoning digital economy allows naught for personal allegiance, brand loyalty, and the obsolete economies of centralized legal services within one honking big firm. The lawyers who are likely to survive the changes are those who forge new alliances, new efficiencies, and new modes of professional training. All three will emerge from a new application of the Web, The Virtual Guild. The Virtual Guild is a label for lawyers using the Web to combine all the essential knowledge and expertise from their respective specialties, to pool intellectual work product to common benefit, and to collectively underwrite research, issue analysis and contacts within supporting disciplines. What membership offers is a multiplication of intellectual force, the power of the many afforded the one, an online resource for every statute, commentary, case synopsis, law link, valued expert, relevant case, current motion practice, the vast combination of all the work product of the membership that would be helpful to other members of that professional affinity group.