Franchisng has worked very well for a lot of businesses…take McDonalds…it is now a multi-billion $ corporation. You can walk into a Mickyd’s in Beijing, Moscow, Paris, etc., and be assured of getting the same crappy meal!
Which leads me to wonder…why aren’t law firms franchised? Take that very successful lawyer who does celebrity divorces (what’s his name?)-why doesn’t he franchise his operation and make even MORE money? Or this Gerragos guy who takes on hopeless cases…his name oughtta be worth some bucks in the franchise game!
Or those old money, blue-blood law firms (like Mckinnon , Arps and Skidmore)-why not frmachise their name. It’s a whole lot classier to have your divorce handled by them instead of some dumpy-sounding outfit like Blotnick, Blotnick & Schmuck!
Are there any problems with using a prestige-name law firm (if it is a really a franchise)?
To start, a huge pool of ethical rules governing the practice of law the restrict your ability regarding use of names, misleading titles, practice in association with non-attorneys, etc.
I’m sorry…I misread the OP.
Law is so much a personal thing I doubt anyone would want to franchise out their name.
And, of course, a lot of big law firms have offices in multiple cities. So, Skadden, for example, has offices in 21 cities around the world.
Although there are some people who are attracted to a law firm by big-name attorney partners, in general what people seek in a lawyer is expertise devoted to their particular concerns. Franchising would accomplish nothing toward that end – if I went to the Zebulon franchise of a nationally known firm, what I’m going to get is the two local attorneys who run that franchise, not the expertise of the “rainmaker” partners of the national franchising operation. If I need their expertise, I’ll need to contract with them, either directly or as a consultant to my local counsel.
And remember that 95% of law is local in nature – it’s knowing the operation of the laws in a given state, how to play the system for the best results for your client, and a host of other things that are not portable.
Hence franchising is about as useful in law as in brain surgery, and for about the same reasons.
Others have mentioned the ethical rules, specifically the rules against associating with non-lawyers. In countries other than the U.S., accountants and lawyers are partnered much more closely. There are also rules about, as noted, de facto false advertising, e.g., you can’t call it Smith, Jones, and Bloggs if Bloggs never practiced there.
Franchises also seem to work well for businesses in which consistency of product is at a premium. For just the reasons the OP notes, this makes Mickey D’s attractive to me on the ninth day of my Bulgaria trip, when I’ve wearied of the crapshoot of finding a local restaurant that’s charming and delicious rather than filthy and awful-tasting. I know exactly what those fries will taste like, and that my meal will come at a reasonable price vis a vis its quality.
You will not find any high-profile law firm admitting that their services are McDonald’s-level commodities, I suspect. Rather, their marketing will focus on how they tailor their legal solutions to the unique challenges confronting each client, etc. Why? Because “commodity level” legal work (which does exist, at least in the probably-biased view of lots of lawyers and businessmen) – such tasks as churning out wills or clearing titles or writing cookie-cutter patent applications – is associated with the lowest fees. Those big-name firms are charging $300-$700 an hour for their lawyers’ time. You just can’t do that if you’ve admitted that all you’re offering is a standardized, same-everywhere-you-go, commodity (even if, in some cases, it may well be).
Having said that, there are some mega-firms, including U.S. based firms, that are perceived or referred to as “franchises” because they open up multiple offices in which they affiliate with local attorneys in a fashion that, while it satisfies all local legal requirements, falls somewhat short of what traditional law firms regard as “partnership” or being a full-fledged local office. E.g., you find a prominent local firm who sees the advantages of marketing their services under the name of [Big American Firm] as opposed to [Gonzalez y Hermanos], and thus you arrange to bring them on as the Lake Titicaca “office” of [BAF]. Doesn’t mean that the Gonzalez boys are necessarily splitting equity profits on the same basis as the guys back in Cleveland or L.A. or that the home office has minute-to-minute control over the work product the locals are churning out.
Baker & McKenzie is probably the best-known firm for plastering its name on law offices the world over. They have 69 offices in 38 countries.
Why would a law firm, having achieved a level of business success and professional reputation want to be like McDonald’s?
Because McDonald’s is one of the best known corporate names in the world, has been the epitome of entrepreneurial success, delivers a consistent product worldwide and is handsomely profitable?..
I agree with Huerta88’s post, but it is true that there are many legal needs that are comodity purchases. McDonald’s knows it’s place in the marketplace and doesn’t endeavor to be Chili’s, TGIFriday’s or the Rainbow Room. I would think that a franchise law firm would not be well equipped to advice Microsoft’s purchasing of Oracle for example, or even to defend Scott Peterson. (Of Laci/Connor Peterson fame)
However, wills, basic estate planning, real estate transactions, insurance disputes, simple no-fault divorces, minor criminal cases like traffic or DUIs should be able to be handled this way. Just as McDonald’s, Timex, Wal-Mart etc etc know their place in the market/customer, a successful franchise law firm would have to know where it can be cost effective, competitive and profitable.
And it has been done before. A guy named Joel Hyatt opened a series of legal clinics, staffed by lawyers, in the 80s/90s. It was a no frills, store front operation and I think they did OK for a long while. (Hyatt legal Services) I’m sure that running a franchise with professionals has iot’s own challenges, but I don’t see why it can’t be done. (Like an H&R Block type format maybe…)
Way back when, the firm of Jacoby and Meyers seemed to be expanding nationwide, offering basic legal services at budget prices… but I haven’t heard anything about them in years.
I’ve seen a billboard for Johnny Cochran’s law firm in either Memphis or St Louis. I don’t remember which. Maybe it was in both. I know the law firm my mother worked in (250+ attorneys) in Columbus, OH, had branches in Cincinnati AND Washington, DC.
So, at what point does having different branch offices become a franchise?
Franchises are independent businesses with independent owners, using property - usually intellectual property, but sometimes premises, raw materials, etc - supplied to them by a franchisor.
So if ABC Burger Joint Inc owns six (or sixty, or six hundred) buildings, in each of which it employs staff to cook and sell burgers, that’s not a franchise. But if DEF Burger Joint Inc enters into agreements with people who own suitable premises under which it licenses them to sell burgers under the name DEF Burgers, stipulates the decor of the premises, content of the menu, etc, supplies the raw materials to be used, and often more besides, that’s a franchise.
The same business can operate some premises directly as branches, and licence franchisees to run others. Generally the customer won’t notice any difference.
I can think of a couple of areas of law that could lend themselves to franchising out - wills, and conveyancing. Areas where you really do churn through standard cases, and hope that most are pretty much like the next one.
As it happened, the company that handled my grandmother’s will, I see from their web page, has half a dozen independent offices. Whether that makes them ‘franchisable’ I don’t know - I’m not sure what the practical difference is between an independantly franchised outfit and multiple locations of a large firm.
I won’t name the firm I’m thinking of. They were crap.
Is H&R Block franchised? Or just a big firm with lots of offices
Probably for the same reason accounting, consulting, investment banking and other professional services firms don’t franchise. It doesn’t fit with their business model. Professional services firms are typically partnerships where the main role of the partners is selling business and collecting revenue from billing out junior staff. To “franchise”, the franchise owner would essentially be buying in as a partner capable of generating enough business to keep x number of associates busy.
That was also my impression. I googled “the Legal Clinic of Jacoby and Meyers” and found a link to a description of Jacoby v. State Bar. It may contain the answer to whatever happened to those guys,* but it turns out I’m not motivated enough to read the whole page.
*Jacoby and Meyers IS a regular law firm these days, btw, without the “Legal Clinic” bit.
According to their website, they have law offices in several states from coast to coast.
At the ambulance chaser level, the Johnny Cochran law firm is a franchise. It seems to work reasonably well and the franchisees seem to get some value from collective marketing.
At the corporate level Baker McKenzie is about as close as you get (at least among American law firms) and even there its based on jurisdiction. It doesn’t work quite as well at that level because reputation is pretty much the entire game and you can’t really franchise that.
In the US, law firms are not allowed to raise venture capital or list themselves on the stock exchange (Australia and the UK have just started allowing it). This is a significant hurdle that hampers the kind of large scale expansion that happens in other industries. Because of this, law firms have traditionally underinvested in systems and automation and are run pretty inefficiently, as most small businesses are.
I really don’t know what the benefits would be to franchising. There are a lot of law shops that to my mind sorta seem related. But not really, because the principal owns all the shops.
Peter Fancis Geraci is big in bankrutcy law in the Chicago area - all over the late night and afternoon TV. Has shops with his name in strip malls all over. I imagine he has fleets of contract employees - probably mainly paralegals clerks who do all the work, and he just takes a large share of the profits.
In the Social Security disability realm, Binder and Binder (the idiot in the hat) just filed for bankruptcy, but was nationwide for several years. They just had a bunch of office cloes work up the cases as needed, then they’d hire local lawyers or non-attorneys when an appearance was needed. There are several other big disability law firms.
Then there’s the ever classy “Been in a wreck? Need a check?” billboards. I assume they are operating along similar lines in the PI area.
That formula seems to work quite well for attys who want to churn high volumes of cases.
As far as elite firms are concerns, lawyers do not generally like giving up control. There are a lot of really big, international firms, which may have relatively small offices in some farflung location. Not sure why a franchise would be better,
And, as has been observed, a lot of it is tradition and inefficiency.
Actually, the trend I see next is offshoring of legal services, but that’s another thread…
Most people only need the services of a lawyer occasionally, to draw up a will or something like that. Those people MIGHT be receptive to a franchise law firm, but nowadays, they might just go straight to LegalZoom or some other online legal service.
The people who need legal assistance often probably don’t want to play it cheap. They want a REAL law firm.