Vitamins and painkillers

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The theory goes, so say any number of thought-pieces, that there are three kinds of business:

1. Painkillers: Those that address acute immediate problems
2. Vitamins: Those that prevent problems over the medium to long term:
3. Candy: Those that do nothing, but distract us from the existential horror of our daily lives, what the doctor is about to do to us, the dawning realisation that this is all there is, and so on.

This seems a threadbare view of the medical profession, let alone the commercial world at large. Isn’t there a bit more to it than that?

To indulge what may be just a bad metaphor, it overlooks important medical functions such as, you know, diagnosing patients and then curing them.

Painkillers

Paracetamol has the appeal of being quick, generic, asking no great talent of those who prescribe or administer them, and being, at first blush, effective. This they share with legaltech, if by “first blush” you mean “powerpoint pitch to GC".

Painkillers work best where what your patient suffers from is superficial, baffling or terminal. If you haven't looked, it is lazy, and liable only to compound the injury.

Of course, diagnosing is hard and — when your client is a sclerotic institution, forged over the ages through countless regretted mergers, siloed, recombined, spun out, reverse-merged and now sputtering asking with a consumptive wheeze, riven by turf wars, haunted by all this past catastrophe and silted up with poor practice, bad process and superfluous policy — treatment is harder. You too may be tempted to say “take two of these and call me in the morning”.

Vitamins

Painkillers have at least that benefit of demonstrable difference. Vitamins are more oblique in their quackery. Their instant appeal is that they sound technical and by design, are not meant to work immediately, so there is no disappointment from the patient when they don't make a difference.

The beauty of the long time frame is the scope for intervening causes: by the time your vitamins are meant to have worked the patient night have, of its own motion, mended is dissolute ways, in which case you can credit this to your pills.

More likely, if your clients are anything like the JC’s, it absolutely won't have got better, will in face be a lot worse, but in the mean there plenty enough will have happened by way of obliterating alternative intrusion. Macro geopolitical events like COVID, Brexit, the war in Ukraine, and climate change are easy to cite and magnificently unfalsifiable — Advising our patients to live better lives, and therefore avoid the need for quack palliatives, quick fixes and cute misdirection.

Seeing legal service as something that either masks a deep-seated malaise without addressing it - a painkiller - or a quick, cheap and hard-to-prove-or-falsify substitute for the hard work of maintaining a healthy lifestyle — a vitamin — is the classic legal-tech take.

It is excellent advice in cynicism: the last thing you want to do is heal your client, much less advise her about her diet of lifestyle, because by these you do yourself out of a regular stream of income. Sad face.