Three newsletters in and I’m already telling you about my broken heart.
The difference between our clients’ needs and our clients’ demands.
Something pretty big came up in the past couple of weeks at work.
Something that has me thinking back to when my heartbroken ass first found itself in a therapist’s chair.
Something I first heard around the time I exceeded the 10-session limit on my Medicare-subsidised mental health plan, many years ago.
The team at Vale — which you’ll be hearing much more about soon — is putting together a report on the Australian probate landscape.
We’ve combed through inordinate amounts of data, as well as having conducted a national survey, painstakingly documenting the current state of the probate sector. We soon realised that our findings could be of significant value to firms and practitioners nation-wide, and so here we are.
We haven’t released it yet, so please stop reading if you’re particularly sensitive to spoilers.
In a section on the different services being provided by our sector, we noticed a predictable disparity between the demand for simple wills and the demand for more complex services.
While we understand the huge importance of simple will services, we were curious about whether there are instances in which simple wills are being offered in lieu of more appropriate services. Naturally, our data pointed to cost barriers for clients, as well as capacity barriers among some firms.
But then something hit me. Something strangely personal.
Are ‘cost barriers’ for clients always the result of financial constraints? What would it mean if they weren’t? What if clients’ demands exist independently of clients’ actual needs?
Just, Quick, and Cheap Pizza
Let’s step out of probate and start with an analogous example:
It is not a cost ‘barrier’ that stops me from ordering pizza from Bella Brutta on King Street.
I can afford gourmet pizza, and I know that it’s healthier and tastier than Domino’s.
But Domino’s arrives in 20 minutes, costs half the price, and as someone with an active lifestyle, I’m not that concerned about the extra 200-400 calories.
In other words, I have a preference for cheap and quick pizza. I understand enough about the differences in these products for my pizza needs to be aptly represented by my pizza demands.
As my needs are adequately reflected by my educated demands, the quick and cheap delivery of pizza from Domino’s and into Tom O’Neill represents a just transaction.
But how just would the administering of pizza be to a hungry consumer with no prior understanding of the differences between Bella Brutta and Domino’s?
Demands v Needs
What if cost ‘barriers’ were, in many cases, just cost ‘preferences’? And what if those preferences were guided by factors other than our various services’ strengths and weaknesses, or those services’ appropriateness for someone in need?
Worse still, what if the general public knew so little about probate that they were unable to preference services better suited to their own unique situations? What if prospective clients ranked the probate services they would be most likely to seek based not on an appreciation of their own needs, but on the only metric they understand: cost.
I maintain that while this is a totally reasonable way to choose a bottle of wine when you know nothing about wine, it’s a terrible way to select legal services (if you can avoid it).
So, we might need to re-think what we really mean when we refer to ‘cost barriers’, need, and demand.
How often are we conflating Australians’ genuine inability to afford Bella Brutta — or, potentially more appropriate probate services — with a mere preference for ‘cheap’ and ‘quick’?
In a perfect world, the legal services market would operate how all markets should. Informed, rational people shop around for the most cost-effective ways to create a will, aware of the differences between services and aware of their own needs.
This scenario is something that we should, in principle, be proud to be able to deliver. Transparency and client agency should be celebrated when delivered. If clients were steering the market towards providing cheaper services, then they’d be doing what Australian consumers did with our Telcos. (Yes, blame your social media addiction on the market forces that brought us unlimited data plans.)
ECON101 textbooks tell us that suppliers respond to market demands in order to compete. It follows that the suppliers of legal services should therefore respond to the rational and informed demands of clients.
Right..?
The ‘rational’ consumer.
But what if Peter Noel Murray (PhD) is right?
“Who is Peter Noel Murray?”, you ask.
Peter Noel Murray is a member of the American Psychological Association and the Society of Consumer Psychology, and the founder & CEO of EmotionInc and Principal of Peter Noel Murray PhD and Partners, a research-based consulting practice focusing on emotion and behaviour change.
Dr. Murray is someone who believes that consumers might not be as rational as we’re assuming:
“Consumers believe that they act rationally to maximize their personal best interests when making purchase decisions… But consumer rationality is more myth than fact. We know this from an in-depth analysis of consumers’ self-reported behavior and a review of the psychological factors that affect their purchasing process.”
— ‘The Myth of the Rational Consumer’, Psychology Today 8/3/2016.
Dr. Murray’s work, among the work of many others economists and psychologists, confirm that we are right to ask the questions we’ve been asking: What if Australians were shopping for the cheapest services without understanding the scope and value of our sector’s broader services on offer?
What if the data we’re using about ‘client demand’ compels us to conflate ‘demand’ and ‘need’?
Pain-full decision making
I really did have my heart broken in my 20s. It was bad. Driven by a crushed self-esteem and a penchant for escapism, I did what any irrational serotonin scavenger would do. I embarked on an SAS training program which involved 6 months of 6-days-per-week gruelling training. For those less familiar, this is military-style physical training program designed for those who want to enter the elite special forces.
I got super fit. I watched my arms grow, my shoulders broaden, and the time I’d been devoting to emotional pain was now being interrupted by physical pain. My dehydration levels however remained constant, break-up tears having been replaced by vomits in between burpees.
I vigorously trained my way into therapy (the chin-ups didn’t work). If you haven’t seen a therapist, I strongly suggest it. No matter where you are in life, to have another human help us understand ourselves is a remarkable privilege.
I was exercising a demand: to escape emotional pain.
But what I learned in therapy was that my needs were very different to the demands I was exercising. While it felt like immediate relief through masochistic exercise would satisfy the demand to not grieve, what I really needed was something else.
Humans are guided by pretty simple drivers. Pleasure. Efficiency. Simplicity. I wanted to feel better, I found a simple solution, and I found a program that promised its delivery efficiently.
As probate lawyers, we are guided by a pretty simple mandate. The just, quick, and cheap delivery of legal services.
If our sector takes clients’ legal literacy for granted, we assume that our clients are aware of their actual needs and how best to have those needs satisfied. If we were to convince ourselves that client demand for simple wills is an apt reflection of the Australian population’s actual need for simple wills alone, we would be assuming that our sector’s clients are an exception to the rule.
Here’s what we know:
I can’t count the number of times that clients have told me that what they want is absolutely not what they need;
Wills and estates can be accompanied by serious emotional baggage, from heartbreak, to grief, to seething interpersonal resentment. If there were ever dispositions that may bestow clarity, these are not those;
That the delivery of the ‘quick’ and the ‘cheap’ can come at the expense of the ‘just’;
That the demand for ‘quick’ and ‘cheap’ can often have more to do with misunderstanding than financial barriers.
Our report will go into some more detail on what I’ve outlined above—without the diatribe about 20-something-year-old me’s maladaptive coping mechanisms.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear some thoughts on how to better educate the Australian population about our sector’s services, and whether or not you think that client demands for certain services are actually reflective of their needs.
We’re experiencing a pretty sizeable inter-generational wealth transfer. It’s within everyone’s best interests that we facilitate educated and informed needs-based demands of our legal services.