"Magic" work or "logic" work? Lawyers must understand the difference

”Do you know how long it takes a good surgeon to remove an appendix from first incision to closure? Seven minutes. If you gave me two hours with anyone smart enough to finish college in five years, I could teach him or her how to remove an appendix. It’s really very simple.  But do you know how long it would take me to teach that same college graduate what to do if something went wrong while removing that appendix? Six years of medical training.” This is a story repeated by David W Cottle in his excellent book “Bill What You’re Worth”.  A couple of lessons from this – when purchasing a service, you should be paying for skill rather than time spent.  Secondly, you should be focussing on outcome, which defines value, rather than the mechanics of the task itself. The surgeon's value is the successful removal of the appendix, and resolution of any complications, rather than the time taken.

On this theme, I recently attended a conference where Tim Williams, an advertising guru from Ignition Group, spoke about Magic and Logic work.  Tim explained that advertising agencies are experiencing the impact of client's believing they can do "logic" work themselves, with ad agencies needing to focus on the "magic" work to survive.  For advertising agencies, magic work is:

• consumer insights
• strategic planning
• concept development
• reputation management
• product development
• marketing ideation
• creation planning

Magic work has the characteristics of being highly skilled, strategic, experiential, unique fact situations or high risk.  In part, whether work is magic is a subjective assessment on the part of the client - what one client sees as magic work, another might see as logic work.

The magic work of lawyers includes:

• client insights
• contextual insights
• strategic planning
• solution creation
• resolution identification
• empathetic comfort

It's the magic work which lawyers do which delivers the value, and which a client wants the experienced strategist to do, not the junior lawyer.  Even in commoditized work, there is an element of magic work.  In a conveyance, that first review of whether there are any traps or problems with the contract, in the context relevant to the particular client, is "magic" work for a home purchaser.  Providing comfort to a concerned client that their will is unlikely to be contested is  "magic" work.

A great example of recent "magic" work in the Australian context is the intervention of Arnold Bloch Leibler lawyer Leon Zwier to successfully mediate the Centro class action.  He succeeded where other highly successful mediators had failed, in bringing to a close a case which was estimated to be costing millions each day of the hearing.  I doubt there were any quibbles about his remuneration, nor can his value cannot be quantified in time spent.

For most matters, there will be an element of both magic and logic work involved.  It is an interesting, and more productive, discussion to ask your lawyers to define the magic work, and allocate only the logic work to the more junior team members.