As you can see from the video above, before you sit down to start drafting your mission statement it is helpful to have an idea of why people might seek the services of a legal professional in the first place.

And by this I mean getting up at the 30,000 foot level to start with. Not just what a client is looking to get from a lawyer (an estate plan, or a defense in trial, or a settlement for discrimination, etc.), but what high-level need they're satisfying.

Some of the thinking around this comes from Jobs To Be Done theory, a great distillation of customer needs that starts with the question, "What is the job that the customer is hiring my particular product or service to do."

The concept has been popularized by two authors, each of which has a book. Anthony Ulwick's is simply called Jobs to Be Done (Amazon link), and his book site has a ton of resources, some of them free. I have a slight personal preference for Clayton Christensen's Competing Against Luck (Amazon link, Powells link, book site) mostly because I like his storytelling, which you can hear for yourself in his excellent episode of the Harvard Business Review Ideacast podcast.

For legal professionals, the risk mitigation part of the client's job to be done usually boils down to addressing some combination of the client's fear, uncertainty, and doubt; what folks in the technology industry shorten to FUD. With a few exceptions, most people seeking legal help are operating in a high-FUD environment.

As you'll see in the video, that largely comes down to clients and prospects needing help in two practical areas: Mitigating Risk and Navigating Complexity. That layers in interesting ways with solving for some emotional needs around seeking wisdom, advice, and consortium.

Keep those ideas in mind as we move to the next lesson: Being intentional about your slice of the overall legal services marketplace.

Lesson 4: What Legal Professionals Solve For

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