The Lawyer Who Asks Why Not

Los Angeles attorney Pankaj Raval has spent a decade auditing the conventions of his own profession, starting with the one that makes clients afraid to pick up the phone.

There is a particular hesitation that business owners know well. Something has gone slightly wrong. A contract has arrived with a clause that reads strangely. A partner has started acting like the terms were different than you remember. You think about calling your lawyer, and then you think about what that call will cost, and you decide to wait a week.

Pankaj Raval has built an entire law firm around the conviction that this hesitation is not your fault.

He is the founder of Carbon Law Group in Los Angeles, and he did not arrive at the law by the usual road. He studied economics and sociology and worked as a graphic designer. In 2014, while seriously considering leaving the profession, he enrolled in a product management course in Santa Monica and walked out with an idea that reorganized his career instead of ending it.

We spoke with him about behavioral economics, the incentives hidden inside a billable hour, and why he thinks empathy is a competitive advantage rather than a soft skill.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Behavioral economics lives right in that gap

Where did your interest in behavioral economics and design thinking start?

I studied economics and sociology at Arizona, and the interesting part for me was always the space between the two. Economics tells you people are rational actors. Then sociology tells you that, actually, people do all kinds of things for reasons they could not explain to you if you asked them directly.

Behavioral economics lives right in that gap. I got hooked pretty early.

Design thinking came from a different direction entirely. I was a graphic designer before I was a lawyer, so I was already trained to think about the person on the receiving end. Does this land? Is it clear? Does it feel good to use?

Then in 2014 I took a product management course at General Assembly in Santa Monica. At the time I was seriously considering leaving the law. I loved the course. And the idea I walked out with was simple, but it reorganized everything: a law firm is a product. It has users. It has an experience. And most law firms have a genuinely bad one.

So I do not really think of these as two separate interests. They are both ways of asking the same question. What is the human in this transaction actually experiencing, and why do they behave the way they do?

There is a Maya Angelou line we keep in the office, about how people will not remember what you did or said, they will remember how you made them feel. That is a behavioral insight as much as a warm sentiment. It is basically our whole design brief.

That is a design flaw, and it is a serious one

How do those ideas influence how you run the firm day to day?

The biggest one is that I try to design for how people actually behave instead of how we wish they would behave.

Take the billable hour. Every client I have ever had is a little afraid to call their lawyer, because the meter is running and they do not know what a fifteen minute question is going to cost them.

That is a design flaw, and it is a serious one. It punishes the exact behavior you want most, which is the client telling you about a problem early, while it is still cheap to fix.

We talk about being proactive as one of our core values. But you cannot be proactive if your pricing model makes the client hesitate before picking up the phone. So value based pricing and our subscription models are not only pricing decisions. They are behavioral ones. We are removing friction from the moment that matters most.

The second piece is language. A lot of lawyers use complexity as a signal of expertise. It works on some level, but it leaves the client passive and a little intimidated. That is the opposite of what you want.

If someone does not really understand the deal they are signing, they cannot make a good decision. And then I have failed, even if the document itself is flawless. Empowerment is one of our values, and empowerment is mostly a communication design problem.

After that, it is a lot of small things. What our onboarding feels like. Whether the first ten minutes of a meeting leaves somebody calmer or further behind. Where we choose to spend on technology.

We say we build transformational relationships rather than transactional ones. The difference between those two is almost entirely in the design of the experience, not in the quality of the legal work. Plenty of firms do excellent legal work and still make you feel like a case number.

Why does it have to be done this way?

Can you give an example of a firm decision that came directly from that thinking?

The clearest one is moving to value based pricing and subscriptions.

Everybody told me you cannot do that in a services business, because your inventory is time. But I keep coming back to a question I ask a lot: why not? Why does it have to be done this way?

I use time very differently now than I did fifteen years ago. Technology means some things take a fraction as long as they used to. Under a pure hourly model, getting better at my job means earning less. That is an insane incentive if you sit with it for even a minute.

So we price on the value delivered instead. Our stated vision is to change how people perceive and engage with legal services, and you cannot do that while keeping the one mechanism that makes people dread engaging with us.

Here is a smaller example, but I think it is just as telling. We start every Monday team meeting with a five minute guided meditation before we touch any firm business.

That came out of a behavioral observation. Everybody arrives at that meeting still halfway inside their inbox. You cannot simply ask people to be present. You have to design a moment that gets them there. Five minutes buys us a whole meeting’s worth of real attention.

And going back further, I was one of the first lawyers on Yelp. That was not strategy so much as noticing where people actually go when they need help, which turned out not to be where lawyers were advertising.

A relationship problem wearing a contract costume

Raval’s favorite book is Tom Robbins’s Still Life With Woodpecker, which is not the answer you expect from a business attorney.

Does that book say something about how your mind works?

I love his writing. The way he is so free with it, and it seems to sing.

And yes, I think it does say something. It is a book that refuses to stay in its lane. It is a love story and a philosophy book and a running joke all at once, and it holds together on voice rather than structure.

That is fairly close to how my brain works. I have ADHD, so I am constantly connecting things that do not obviously belong together. For years I treated that as a liability. Now I think it is the main asset.

Robbins takes unrelated things and finds the thread. That is the same instinct that lets me look at a law firm and see a product. It is also what lets me look at a client’s contract dispute and see that it is really a relationship problem wearing a contract costume.

That last point matters more than it sounds. When a client comes in with a breach of contract issue, the document is rarely the whole story. There is usually a partnership that drifted, or an expectation nobody wrote down. If you only litigate the paper, you solve half the problem.

There is also the playfulness. Law is a serious profession and it takes itself extremely seriously, and I have come to think a lot of that seriousness is armor rather than substance. A book like that is permission to be rigorous and still enjoy yourself.

I would rather be the lawyer clients actually want to talk to.

Most of the conventions in your industry are not rules

What is your advice to founders who want to build something different from the norm?

Ask why not instead of why.

Most of the conventions in your industry are not rules. They are accumulated habit that nobody has audited in thirty years. When someone tells you it cannot be done that way, ask what specifically would break. Usually the honest answer is nothing, we just have not.

Second, go collect skills that have nothing to do with your industry. My design background and my product management background have done more for this firm than any additional legal training I could have bought.

Being multifaceted is one of my real strengths, and it is where nearly all of my good ideas come from. If everyone in your field trains the same way and reads the same things, the only way to see what they cannot see is to know something they do not.

Third, design for the human, not the transaction. Understand what your customer is actually feeling when they come to you. Usually it is some mix of confused, rushed, and a little afraid. Build for that person rather than the rational actor in the textbook.

Empathy is a superpower here, not a soft skill, and I would push back hard on the CEOs out there talking it down.

And be patient with the fact that different is uncomfortable for a while. You will get pushback, some of it from people you respect. That is the price. Build the thing anyway.

What to ask before you hire a business attorney

Raval’s argument has a practical edge for anyone running a small company. Legal quality matters, but so does whether the structure of the relationship encourages you to raise problems while they are still small.

A few questions worth asking any firm you are considering. How do you bill, and does a quick question cost me money? Can you explain my last contract to me in plain English? What happens if I call you three times in a week?

At Carbon Law Group, Pankaj and the team advise startups, small businesses, and creative founders on entity formation, contracts, intellectual property, worker classification, and the quiet structural decisions that determine whether a company holds up under pressure. The value based pricing and subscription options exist for a specific reason. Calling your lawyer should never feel like a gamble.

If you would like to talk through what your business actually needs, visit carbonlg.com to schedule a consultation. Bring the messy version of the question. That is usually the one worth solving.

Take the next step book your consultation today, and safeguard your brand’s future.

Connect with us: Carbon Law Group

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 [Pankaj on LinkedIn]

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