In 2011, Harvard's Michael Norton ran a study where people paid 63% more for furniture they assembled themselves.

He named it the IKEA effect.

People place far more value on things they help build.

Law firms are about to waste the biggest free advantage in professional services.

I learned about the concept from my brilliant friend Lucía who is a lawyer and behavioral scientist on last week's podcast (min 34:51).

The client service model is getting rebuilt right now. How work is delivered. How it's priced. How clients are engaged. AI is forcing all three.

And most firms are rebuilding it the same way they built the last one. Internally. Quietly. Then presenting it to clients as a finished product.

That's exactly backwards.

Deloitte just surveyed over 120 senior in-house legal leaders and found 58% say their outside firms rarely or never proactively discuss AI with them.

The redesign is happening in isolation from the people it's supposed to serve.

Here's what firms are missing. A pricing model a client helped shape is a pricing model they'll defend in their own procurement process.

A delivery model they had a hand in designing is one they'll value more, forgive more, and gravitate towards because they invested in it.

That's the bias Norton measured.

A model handed to them fully assembled gets inspected for flaws.

I've had a string of conversations with in-house legal leaders recently, and they're not shy about what they want to build toward:

• Transparency into how work actually gets done.
• What technology is being used.
• How leverage is being applied.
• What efficiency gains are showing up on matters of similar size/shape.
• Control of their own data.

The blueprint is sitting there. Clients are volunteering it.

The firms that win the next decade won't be the ones with the cleverest new model.

They'll be the ones whose clients can say: we built this together.

So a question for law firm leaders: have you invited a single client into the room where you're redesigning your delivery model?