Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 June 2026
Lawyers, and their clients, might have a romanticized view of what it is the lawyer does throughout the day, and within that misperception lies some of the dysfunction that leaves the legal sector ripe for disruption. In this chapter, I will conduct an analysis of the types of services that lawyers provide and how they provide them. This analysis will describe such services along a temporal continuum, one that often corresponds to the intensity of the services provided as well. That is, it is often the case that the services become more complex the longer a lawyer engages with a consumer and their legal problem. I will present this as the “horizontal” service continuum. To complement that assessment of law practice, I will also offer a “vertical” view of the services typically provided by lawyers: how a lawyer functions in a particular sector or specialty. Once we can isolate and disaggregate the type of service that is provided along the horizontal continuum, and view it within the vertical stack of services provided within a particular sector, we can then start to apply a job- to- be- done framework against this vertical and horizontal matrix, to understand the values and functions at stake in the delivery of a particular type of service, applied in a particular area, for a particular client, in a specific context. When we isolate the service provided in a specific context we can then explore what mode or agent of service is best suited to deliver on the values and functions at stake in that context. In other words, once we understand the what of service, we can then try to isolate the why of service. In turn, we can then think about the who of service.
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