What If Lawyers Ran Amazon?

A thought experiment about what would happen if Jeff Bezos ran his business like a law firm.

Jeff Bezos (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

The Scene – A Boardroom at Amazon.com’s HQ2. The room is filled with Executives. Jeff Bezos stands at the head of the table.

BEZOS: They thought me mad when I planned to sell books online. “People will never trust their credit card to the internet,” they said! “People need the tactile sensation of picking up a book,” they said! We proved them wrong, team; we proved them wrong!

EXECUTIVES: Hear hear! Harrumph!

BEZOS: SILENCE!

Silence.

BEZOS: They thought us mad once, and I promise you today, they will think us mad again. Inspiration has struck me, team. The divine muse of business has lain a wreath of knowledge upon my brow. Too long has Amazon structured itself like a technology company. Starting next week, we adopt that most august of business models…

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The Executives lean in.

BEZOS: The law firm!

The Executives initially roar with approval, but soon subside into quizzical looks and sounds. One Executive at the foot of the table meekly raises their hand.

TIMID EXECUTIVE: What exactly does that mean, sir?

BEZOS: It means that I am no longer the sole voice in charge of Amazon. Every person in this room now has a say in all of Amazon’s decisions.

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Astonished, happy cries.

BEZOS: And every person in the room next to us. And the next three rooms over. In fact, about 50 percent of the people in this building now have a vote, and we’re going to need most of us to agree on something before we can do anything.

TIMID EXECUTIVE: You mean every idea anyone has comes up to a vote for the entire company?

BEZOS: Oh heavens no! That wouldn’t work at all. Only the ideas that make it out of committee. If you’ll all please reach underneath your chairs, you’ll find packets with the 10-to-12 different committees to which you’ve been assigned. You’ll all notice you’ve been assigned to the Ad Hoc Special Committee On the Designation of New Committees, which I think speaks for itself.

The Executives open their envelopes.

TIMID EXECUTIVE: I think there’s been a mistake. It says here that I’m chair of the marketing committee? I don’t know the first thing about marketing.

BEZOS: Don’t you want to demonstrate that you’re a team player? Everyone needs to show that they’re willing to chip in for the betterment of the overall company, and what better way to do that than arbitrarily assign you to teams with tasks you lack the training for and see how you fare? Don’t worry, you’re not expected to have any training or knowledge. You are, however, expected to quickly develop intense, immutable opinions. Whether you base those opinions on relevant facts I will leave to your discretion.

TIMID EXECUTIVE: But how are we expected to get anything done?

BEZOS: That’s an excellent question. The answer is, I don’t know, so let’s form an Exploratory Team to learn how the rest of the market gets things done. We’ll then propose it to the appropriate committees, adopt a watered-down version of the process and then watch the company slowly drift back to doing what it always did. Ooh, you’ll need these!

Bezos pulls out a bucket of water balloons.

BEZOS: Head down to the lobby and start chucking these at whoever comes by. Anyone you hit is on the Exploratory Team.

And we can handle our compensation the same way! Anyone hit by a balloon gets a pay cut.

The Executives start filing out of the room. Bezos is looking at the agenda and doesn’t notice.

BEZOS: Alright, for our next order of business, let’s spend five minutes talking changes to the retirement plan, then have a 90-minute debate over what type of art to hang in the lobby. Remember, we’re running like a law firm now, so let’s keep it personal and keep it nasty, people!

END SCENE

* * *

Obviously I exaggerate, but ask yourself, by how much? Across the industry, the traditional law firm partnership model doesn’t scale well, and it’s not a simple thing to manage an organization with hundreds of people and thousands of moving parts. We lawyers aren’t trained for this sort of management, yet we’re expected to somehow make it work. The end result is often a kludge of systems that work just well enough to get by on, but don’t set firms up to thrive.

Much of this is an artifact of the relative insulation from competition that law firms have enjoyed for the past decades. Yes, law firms compete against one another, but that’s a much smaller pool of competition than the broader business world, which doesn’t require a JD to enter into. There aren’t that many of us in the big picture, and since most in our profession have no idea what we’re doing running large operations, there has been plenty of room for lumbering, inefficient firms to get by.

Those days are coming to an end. Alternative legal service providers like Axiom, UnitedLex, and the Big Four accounting firms are eating away at our market share, and they aren’t weighed down by the institutional bloat so common to our industry. These companies can draw on talent pools that are broader, deeper, leaner, and far hungrier than our own. More importantly, they can identify opportunities and risks quickly, and respond at the speed of thought. They’re the cavemen figuring out how to sharpen rocks and attach them to sticks. We’re looking more and more like the wooly mammoths.

The firms that survive the next decade will be the ones to have adopted practices from the larger business world. They need to convince their attorneys to delegate administrative and marketing tasks to qualified professionals, even if it costs more than having a partner do the work on their own time. They need to centralize decision making, reduce meetings and committees, and make their firms agile. They need to train their attorneys on the concept of “Disagree and Commit” — you might not like the way the firm is going, but once the decision is made you need to do everything in your power to make it work.

So basically, we just need to convince thousands of lawyers to give up power, give up control, and admit that they’re not necessarily the smartest people in the room at all times.

This should be simple, right?


James Goodnow

James Goodnow is an attorneycommentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of NLJ 250 firm Fennemore Craig. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management new release category. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.