Game over?

‘It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail,’ declared the late American writer Gore Vidal. Prosperous high street solicitors can therefore be forgiven a degree of satisfaction over the demise of consolidator Metamorph, notwithstanding the human fallout occasioned by the collapse of the business last month. This, after all, was another disruptor that pledged to ‘revolutionise’ everyday legal services, to the likely detriment of many.

In 2015, Metamorph vowed to acquire 60 high street law firms within five years, bringing ‘innovation to a moribund market’. This carried echoes of the hubris initially displayed by the one-time standard bearer of alternative business structures, Co-operative Legal Services. It’s nine years since the mutual’s sales director claimed that putting the client at the heart of their plans is ‘alien’ to solicitors – prompting a complaint by the Law Society.

As the Society’s then chief executive Des Hudson reminded the Co-op, disruptors did not invent client service. ‘Solicitor firms of many shapes and sizes have been providing excellent service, including in many cases, fixed price or free initial advice to their clients, for many years,’ retorted Hudson. ‘Bad-mouthing a profession, members of which you employ, isn’t going to win credibility in this market (or any other).’ Quite so.

Metamorph did not badmouth anyone, to my knowledge, and the causes of its messy implosion have yet to be precisely determined. But the organisation’s bloodline is illuminating. One co-founder was formerly a director of Co-op Legal Services. And, somewhat poignantly, one of Metamorph’s handful of acquisitions was the husk of Quality Solicitors. Connoisseurs of legal business trivia might remember that Quality Solicitors once signed a deal to operate from 150 branches of WHSmith. It didn’t work out. At all.

In the early days of ABSs many people, including the odd legal business guru, believed consolidators of retail legal services would quickly come to dominate the market. To state that this did not happen is not original: ‘The ABS path is littered with those who flew too close to the sun,’ my Gazette colleague John Hyde wrote almost six years ago.

With Metamorph gone, however, I wonder whether we have finally seen the last of the big, brash ‘game-changers’. Yet another has played the game – and lost.