When Daily Utility Beats Annual Membership

A lawyer recently made a claim that got people talking: most attorneys get more practical help from a $20/month ChatGPT subscription than from their $435 bar association dues.

The post came from Ernie Svenson, a former New Orleans litigator who now runs a membership community for solo and small firm lawyers. We recently had him on the Sidecar Sync podcast to dig into what prompted the post and what it might mean for associations more broadly. His argument wasn't that bar associations are useless. It was that when members start doing the mental math on where they're getting daily value, traditional membership organizations often come up short.

The comparison isn't entirely fair. A ChatGPT subscription and a professional association serve different purposes. But that's almost beside the point. Members are making this comparison anyway, and the fact that it resonates with so many people is worth taking seriously.

The Comparison Members Are Making

When members evaluate whether their dues are worth it, they're not pulling up a spreadsheet of everything the association offers. They're thinking about day-to-day utility. What helped me this week? What answered my question when I needed it?

The tools winning mindshare right now share a few traits: immediate answers, practical application, and zero friction. When someone can ask ChatGPT a question at 10 PM and get a useful response in seconds, that becomes the baseline for what "helpful" feels like.

Ernie put it this way in our conversation: he gets more daily value from peer communities and AI tools than from traditional bar resources. Not because the bar lacks knowledge, but because the experience of accessing that knowledge doesn't match how he actually works. The information might exist somewhere in a member portal or archived publication, but if it takes effort to find, it loses the comparison to something that delivers answers immediately.

This is the shift associations are up against. The competition isn't other associations. It's every frictionless tool and community that members encounter throughout their day.

The Shift From Annual Value to Daily Value

Traditional membership value has long been bundled and annual. Pay your dues, get access to a package of benefits. Some of those benefits you'll use, some you won't, but the overall package justifies the cost.

Members tolerated this model when alternatives didn't exist. Now they're surrounded by tools and communities that deliver value in small, frequent doses. The mental math has changed.

The old question was: "Is this membership worth it over the course of a year?"

The new question is: "What did this do for me this week?"

This shift reflects how nearly every other service in their lives now operates. Streaming services deliver entertainment on demand. SaaS tools provide immediate functionality. Even their coffee shop has an app that remembers their order. The experience of value has become continuous rather than batched.

Subscription fatigue is real, and members are scrutinizing everything that bills them on a recurring basis. When the renewal notice arrives, they're not thinking about the conference they attended eight months ago. They're thinking about what the membership has done for them lately.

What Members Actually Want (And Where They're Finding It)

In his LinkedIn post, Ernie listed where lawyers are actually going when they need help with their practices:

• Facebook groups where they compare case management software
• LinkedIn posts from attorneys who run profitable practices and share what's working
• Reddit threads with immediate peer feedback on real problems
• Online communities where practitioners share ChatGPT prompts and workflows

The pattern across all of these: speed, peer credibility, and practical application.

Ernie shared a few anecdotes that stuck with me. A young lawyer told him he learned more about practice management from Reddit than from his bar association. Another mentioned that his bar still mails a printed directory of local mediators, but he stopped opening mail three years ago.

These aren't outliers. They're signals about where attention is migrating.

What makes these alternative spaces work isn't the platform itself. It's the dynamic. Someone posts a question about automating their intake process, and within an hour, they have ten responses from peers who've actually solved that problem. No committees. No approval workflows. No waiting for the next issue of a publication to address the topic.

Members aren't abandoning associations out of spite. They're following utility to wherever it shows up fastest.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Relevance

Ernie made a distinction in our conversation that's worth sitting with. Bar associations still serve a clear purpose for ethics rules, discipline, licensing, and regulatory compliance. Those functions matter and aren't going anywhere.

But as a resource for building a modern practice? That's where the gap has opened.

Being essential for one function doesn't guarantee relevance for everything else. Associations risk becoming the institution members pay because they have to, not because they want to.

This dynamic is somewhat masked in mandatory membership environments, like state bar associations where lawyers must join to practice. Dues keep coming even as engagement drops. The revenue looks stable, but the relationship is hollowing out underneath.

Voluntary associations feel this pressure more acutely. When members can walk away, the value proposition has to be obvious. Ernie observed that voluntary bar associations tend to be more responsive to member needs for this reason. The feedback loop is more immediate.

For any association, though, the question is the same: If membership became optional tomorrow, how many members would stay? And for those who would leave, where would they go instead?

A Signal, Not a Death Sentence

Ernie's post wasn't an obituary for professional associations. It was a signal about where expectations have shifted.

Associations have assets that ChatGPT and Reddit don't have. Decades of domain expertise. Curated, authoritative resources that have been vetted by practitioners. A community of professionals who share not just a job function but a professional identity.

The challenge isn't a lack of value. It's a delivery problem.

Members aren't asking associations to become AI companies or to compete with free internet forums on their own terms. They're asking for the value they already pay for to be easier to access and use. They want to be able to query their association's knowledge base the way they query ChatGPT. They want peer connections to happen without waiting for an annual conference. They want practical answers to surface when they need them, not when a publication schedule allows.

The associations that recognize this shift and adapt how they deliver value will close the perception gap. They'll take their existing strengths and make them feel as immediate and useful as the tools members are already reaching for.

The ones that assume the annual membership model will hold indefinitely, that members will continue valuing bundled benefits they rarely use, may find themselves losing the comparison more often.

The Question Worth Asking

Ernie ended his post with a challenge: your bar dues may be due soon, but your attention, time, and energy? Invest those where it matters most.

For associations, the parallel question is whether members feel that investing their attention in your resources is worth it. Not just at renewal time, but on any given Tuesday when they have a question and fifteen minutes to find an answer.

The $20 vs. $435 comparison will keep getting made. It's not a fair comparison, but fairness isn't the point. Members are evaluating their professional tools and communities based on daily utility, and associations are part of that evaluation whether they want to be or not.

The goal isn't to win the comparison on price. It's to make members stop making the comparison at all because the value is so obvious, so accessible, and so woven into how they work that the question doesn't even come up.

That's a high bar. But associations have the raw material to clear it. The question is whether they're willing to deliver that value differently than they have before.