When I started as head of innovation at one of the leading Italian law firms, I proposed several projects. Some were successful and made the press. Some didn’t get through. And that’s the point: if every project you launch ends up being a success, you’re not really innovating. Real innovation means lots of ideas will fail, and lots will be rejected anyway.
One of those rejected ideas was simple in concept: replicate in Italy a model that was already working for some of the top startup law firms in Silicon Valley. Offer all of the firm’s templates related to a single field (e.g. startups and venture capital) for free, in a dedicated section of the website. The message to clients would have been clear: “We are lawyers. Our value is not in the templates. Our value is in the advice, in the way we solve problems, in the way we stand by your side every step of the way.“
The idea was rejected. Four main reasons:
Number 1. Not all partners would agree.
Number 2. This is our know-how. We spent thousands of hours building it.
Number 3. Some of our clients may not like this decision (and would discuss our pricing at a later stage).
Number 4. There could be ethical issues, especially considering the Italian Code of Values for lawyers and the current professional law.
All fair points. All reasonable. But still.
I was already thinking at the time about something I keep coming back to and wrote in several articles: the value of knowledge is dropping fast. AI is coming for it. Three years, five, seven, ten. It is very likely that most of what we consider proprietary knowledge today will be worth close to zero.
But that’s not where the real problem is, at least for me. To me, the real problems are two:
First, the quality of knowledge. With AI generating content at scale, there is a lot of noise. Telling what is actually valuable from what is garbage is getting harder by the day.
Second, judgment. So far, machines are good at large-scale statistical analysis, but they cannot make sound judgment calls. Will they ever be? Maybe. But not yet.
So yes, as a client, I still get irritated when someone tries to charge me for a template. Not because templates are useless, but because pretending that the template is the value is a category error. The template is the easy part. The difficult part is knowing what to change, what to leave out, what risk matters, what battle is worth fighting, and when the legal answer is technically right but strategically wrong.
That is what I would pay for. And increasingly, that is the only thing I will pay for.
