Belly Up to the Bar Legal Publishing Exec Because Greg Lambert is Buying IF...

Quoting an excerpt from a tweet by Greg Lambert. (OY, are we excerpting from tweets now!):

I'll buy a drink for the 1st person who applies this idea to legal pricing: http://is.gd/KiuszU

The link takes you to this Freakonomics post, A Bar With Changing Prices:

[The bar has] a drink price index ticker and they had them on TV’s all over the bar. It seemed that if a drink wasn’t ordered in a 15-minute time span the drink would go down a few cents.

Great idea. While I think Mr. Lambert is offering to pick up the tab out of his own pocket, I'm OK with this E-Board member seeking reimbursement from the AALL presidential discretionary fund. Oopsy daisy, my bad, possible AALL antitrustism implications. OK, LLB will pick up the evening's entire bar tab for the first large legal publisher's exec (sorry Jason Wilson, that would be way too easy!) to conclude a nationwide deal with Mr. Lambert, aka as representative of his employer, because he knows how and just as importantly where to conduct business in the real world successfully.

I wonder if this bar's pricing system was the inspiration behind WestMart's "Deal of the Day" sales promos. The Freakonomics post notes a fundamental incentive under this demand-driven pricing scheme that is applicable to the Shed West Era for print pricing. Heck it also would work for out-of-plan resource pricing for licensed online legal search services nationwide. Of course, there is an alternative demand-driven pricing mechanism legal publishers could implement, one law firms are familiar with for legal matters -- how about reverse auctions?

A view from Planet Htrae. Wouldn't a widge on AALL's homepage that links to either real time market data by way of tickers or reverse eBay-ing of vendor legal resources based on demand-driven pricing be just about the most, if not only, real world productive thing AALL's Executive Board vendor liaison could contribute to the vendor-institutional buyer "partnership"? No antitrustism issues!

In an entirely different market context, another 3 Geekster, Toby Brown, observes that there is "evidence of the growing hunger for a market pricing mechanism. I recall one client going to great efforts in its bidding process, with the stated goal of finding 'fair market value’ for any legal work it procured. [ ] But here’s the rub – this market information doesn’t exist."

Well now, AALL's hired help could lead the charge to reshape the Bizarro World's planet that the AALL-vendor "partnerhip" calls their home planet. How? By rounding off the shape edges of its cube shape to produce a circular one by way of a demand-driven feedback loop that reduces pricing instead of increasing prices for low demand products applying one or both of the above-mentioned "solution." That's how a competive market is supposed to operate, isn't it? Oh, my bad ... no such thing as "fair market value" on Htrae. Is that a shadowy grin?

In retrospect, perhaps I'm really only citing to Toby Brown's It’s Magic Button Time (Again) to remind myself just how open-ended LLB's offer to pick up the bar tab is.

After two or three beers with Greg, I will occasionally suggest I would give one of my children to have that kind of data on legal offerings. Although in my defense, I am somewhat vague as to which child.

(Emphasis added.)

Note well, there is no indication that those two 3 Geeksters closed their bar tab after just two or three beers!

Endnote. I've been waiting since Greg's April 13th tweet for a report that a legal publisher accepted his offer. Nope, none forthcoming (yet). Maybe the only issue remaining is the selection of the bar to conclude the deal. How about the D Street Bar & Grill in Encinitas, California? [JH]