Undoing Law’s ‘Vendorization’ Is a Task for Firms and Clients

“You are not vendors.”

It was a simple statement I made during a presentation to outside counsel—natural for someone who spent decades as a law firm partner and now serves as general counsel. It wasn’t intended to be inspirational—more observational. And foundational: It’s written into the introduction to our outside counsel guidelines.

But the reaction surprised me. What came was relief at being recognized as professionals after being treated so often as vendors. The welcome surprise of being seen for the people they aspire to be every day, even in six-minute increments. Even voices cracking from the acknowledgement of what the lawyer-client relationship could be—and, in their experience, now rarely is.

These were the reactions of a profession carrying deep wounds. Long hours reduced to time entries, subject matter expertise commoditized as inventory, professional identities subordinated to billing codes.

But that is not what our profession is.

The ‘Vendorization’ Spiral

I recently wrote about how law firm billing practices—the emphasis on realization, exponential rate growth, and automated billing divorced from individual lawyer judgment—have driven what I called the “vendorization” of the legal profession.

That analysis focused on the cost of that shift to clients. But the responses to my piece made clear that vendorization traps outside counsel too—and that what’s at stake is the entire profession.

If the lawyer-client relationship is bilateral, then so too is its spiral of commercialization. As clients, we have played a role in creating the atmosphere in which outside counsel now operate. We’ve outsourced bill review to companies paid in proportion to the fees they reduce. We’ve imposed rigid guidelines that graft compliance regimes onto professional engagements. We increasingly treat legal services as procurement.

At the same time, we shouldn’t mistake this as a chicken-or-the-egg riddle. The root cause is clear. It wasn’t clients who made profits-per-partner the defining metric of prestige or broke lockstep compensation models and turned the lateral market into something resembling a commodities exchange.

If GCs consult a list to hire outside counsel, it’s Chambers rankings, not profits-per-partner tables. Commercialization has increasingly pushed firms to treat their provision of legal services as an industrial output.

But as clients, we need to own our response to this transformation, even if logical and economically rational. As firms made the legal profession a fee-for-services arrangement, clients responded by treating legal services as bulk-purchasing. For many firm lawyers, our billing review process feels like a green eyeshade game of gotcha auditing.

One partner told me that he was confronted with a write-off for a billing infraction. He had “block billed”—that is, aggregated the day’s work for the client rather than itemizing it by task. He offered to correct the entry, but was told by the third-party bill reviewing service that the entry couldn’t be fixed—the write-off was done, the matter closed. When he raised this with the in-house lawyer he worked with regularly, the lawyer shook his head and said, “We hate this—but it’s been outsourced, and we have no control over it anymore.”

Breaking the Negative Loop

Step by step, both sides have allowed these systemic forces to govern the relationship, each then blaming the other.

This dynamic has been described by social psychologists as a “negative dyadic loop.” In this phenomenon, each party in a bilateral relationship interprets the other’s actions negatively and as a justification for its reaction. It becomes self-reinforcing. But the dynamic isn’t purely systemic—it’s also individual. Every day, each of us can either perpetuate it or step outside of it.

I’ve seen this disruption myself in private practice. I was stung when a deputy GC of an important client told me his boss thought our bill was excessive. But rather than react defensively, we leaned in. We offered a two-part adjustment that partly applied to the current bill and partly to the next engagement, with further discounts if the relationship expanded to new types of work.

The deputy was thrilled—not just by the discount, but by reporting to his GC that his handling of it had yielded a new model. The relationship grew, and what could have introduced tension became mutual investment.

As general counsel, I’ve seen our law firms step outside the cycle. I’ll get a bill with a note from the partner, “We had three lawyers on this call but only one was really necessary—I’m writing off some time.” Or: “We researched this thoroughly, but it didn’t bear fruit, so we’re making an adjustment to share skin in the game.”

These aren’t concessions. They’re exercises of the same judgment and trust that animate the legal work itself. When that perspective is brought to the billing process as well as the advisory process, a richer relationship—in all senses—is forged.

Of course, the dynamic runs the other way too. We also work with firms where relationship partners vanish and our interactions consist of emails from anonymous associates. A colleague once asked about the blur of associates all seeming to do the same thing. I shook my head and said, “It feels like our team is just five guys all named Ben.”

The Collegiality Deficit

As clients, we also try to step outside the spiral. We support our lawyers seeking or sustaining Chambers recognition with alacrity, write notes to firm chairs about strong associate performance, and call associates working late to thank them.

A thank-you dinner or even a souvenir mug commemorating an inside joke from the trenches serve to humanize relationships and call out the human—and corporate—foibles we as lawyers frequently see up close.

The solution—on both sides—cannot be performative. Real collegiality is more than law firms’ digital holiday cards or swag with client logos. It must be embedded in the work itself—in how we collaborate on strategy, how we navigate uncertainty together, how we exercise judgment as thought-partners rather than as vendor and purchaser.

Both sides are trapped in a spiral that diminishes everyone. We can’t escape the systemic tensions—the forces that drive them are strong and enduring. But each considered act reclaims—at least in part, at least for us individually—what makes the profession worth preserving: the partnership between client and counsel, the irreducible exercise of judgment under uncertainty, the sense of shared stewardship for both institutions and the law itself.

This choice matters more than ever. As automation reshapes legal work, the human part—judgment, collaboration, partnership—is what will remain. It’s what distinguishes legal work from materials-and-procurement systems. It’s what we can still control. And it’s the part of our work—and our identity—that matters most.

Columnist Eric Dodson Greenberg is executive vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary of Cox Media Group. Eric writes about leadership, legal operations, and the intersection of law and AI for Bloomberg Law’s Good Counsel column.

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