Only one in 4 clients has complete trust in their law firm to deliver where it really counts for them.

In research conducted by BTI Consultancy, most corporate counsel think the billable hour will stick around for quite some time.

Not because they like it, but because they don’t have complete confidence in their lawyers to:

• Scope the work accurately

• Staff matters intelligently

• Communicate early

• Deliver the expected outcome

So, as AI continues to grow inside law firms, clients will stick with the billable hour because it has the potential to solve different problems:

• Budget with more accuracy

• Prepare budgets faster

• Spot overruns in near real time

• Keep them more informed about the case

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If law firms use AI to solve these issues, corporate counsel seem relatively happy to pay under the billable hour.

That seems like good news if your business model is built on hourly rates.

If you’re happy with that, you could stop reading the rest of this article.

But you shouldn’t. If you do, you’ve missed the bigger point. The problem that damages law firms much more.

Most clients don’t have complete confidence in their legal advisors.

If you’re ok with that, then you’re definitely reading the wrong sort of article. And you’re certainly not aiming to be a trusted advisor to your clients.

In fact, you are acting against their best interests. Unintentionally, but this is the effect of working under the billable hour. And continuing to defend a system that exists partly because clients lack confidence perpetuates the very problem firms should be trying to solve.

Look at what clients want:

They want you to scope the work accurately; to resource matters intelligently; to communicate early; and to deliver the expected outcome.

Yet the vast majority don’t have confidence that their lawyers can do this.

That’s a trust issue. An issue of our own creation that we could solve, but we choose not to. Incentives, culture, wellbeing, communication, accountability, behaviour, and more—they’ve all been negatively impacted by the billable hour. And I acknowledge that change can be difficult, but we’ve repeatedly chosen not to do the difficult work.

Then we wonder why clients have turned to LLMs for answers. Yes, it’s quick; yes, it’s cheap. But clients aren’t just using LLMs to get fast answers at a fraction of the cost of lawyers; they’re using LLMs to question their lawyer’s advice. As their second opinion. And they trust it. So when the lawyer disagrees with the LLM’s output, the lawyer has to work hard to convince the client that the probabilistic, predictive machine with no legal qualifications or experience isn’t the one to bet on.

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How has it come to this? While law firms are patting themselves on the back for finding ways to hold onto the billable hour, clients are voting with the taps of their fingers. On the biggest, most important matters of their lives.

They’re choosing to put their trust in machines that even tell them not to trust them: ‘ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.’ It’s not much of a disclaimer, but it’s a disclaimer nonetheless. And it doesn’t bear any risk when it’s wrong. That’s all on the client. Yet clients are willing to take that risk.

Why has it come to this?

A few months ago, I met someone who told me a story. They had engaged a large law firm for the largest transaction they had ever been involved with and was potentially life-changing. As the transaction drew to a close, the lawyers discovered that they had made a significant error, which caused the client to be in breach of obligations. Although the matter was resolved, the client later saw that they had been charged for rectifying the error, along with being charged for their lawyers attending a closing party, which the client said they had not even attended.

The client made a complaint, which was batted away by the law firm. When the client threatened to sue, the lawyers said they would tie them up in litigation for years. Wanting to avoid both the financial and mental anguish, the client took it no further.

A few years later, this person was involved in another large transaction. This time, when their new lawyers made a mistake, they chose not to complain or sue because, in their words, “you can’t beat lawyers.”

Instead, they built their own AI lawyers across three different LLMs: one to draft agreements, the second to do a first check, and the third to do a second check, before returning to the first for a final review. I explained to this person that LLMs are not trained on legal or commercial matters. Their response was pretty emphatic: “Well, if I can’t trust human lawyers, I might as well take the risk and let AI do it for me.”

For this person, money was not the issue. Trust, confidence, faith in their lawyers had been so eroded that it was worth bearing the risk themselves. Clients don’t have to trust AI more than lawyers for this to be a problem. They only have to trust it enough to question them.

Now, most lawyers will read this story and think, “We would never behave like that.” Good. But that’s not the point. The point is whether your clients have complete confidence in their lawyers. According to the research, most don’t.

This loss of trust isn’t happening because clients suddenly became unreasonable. Sometimes we’ve given them very good reasons not to trust us.

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I’ve written before about complaints to the Legal Ombudsman going up, and Net Promoter Scores for the legal profession being the lowest among professional services.

Trust is the issue. And clients see AI as a way of forcing law firms to become better at the things they should already be doing: scoping, budgeting, communicating and managing matters.

Let’s go back to the research one last time. For me, it creates a paradox:

Clients don’t necessarily want the billable hour. They want what they believe the billable hour currently gives them protection against: poor scoping, poor matter management, surprises, weak communication, and uncertainty.

So when we’re asking the question: “Why won’t clients move away from the billable hour?”, perhaps the better question is: “Why haven’t law firms given clients enough confidence to let it go?”

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Right now, too much of the conversation is about how AI can make the billable hour work better, when we should be asking what would have to change for clients to trust you, whether you have it or not.

The billable hour hasn’t survived because clients believe in it. It’s survived because clients don’t yet have enough confidence in law firms to give up the protection they think it provides.

If AI helps us preserve the billable hour without fixing that lack of trust, what exactly have we achieved?

Clients may stick with the billable hour, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that’s a good thing. Trust has eroded. And when trust erodes, clients look for alternatives. This becomes a business development opportunity. Smart law firms that scope work accurately, staff matters intelligently, communicate early and regularly, and deliver expected outcomes will find those clients who have lost faith in their existing lawyers and win them. Every single time.

That’s something you should think carefully about.

The billable hour may still be winning. That doesn’t mean law firms are.

If you’re ready to start the journey away from the billable hour, Value For Pricing: An Introduction to Value Pricing will be available to buy from 1st September 2026. Join the waiting list here and be among the first to get it: https://147124729.hs-sites-eu1.com/en/pricing-for-value-waitlist

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In early July I spent two days at the RAISE Summit in Paris, one of Europe’s biggest AI conferences. I came home both excited and concerned. Excited because the pace of change is extraordinary. Concerned because it confirmed what I’d been thinking for a long time: that the legal profession is talking about a completely different subject from everyone else.

For the last three-and-a-half years, I’ve watched lawyers debate the same questions:

Can AI draft legal documents?

Can it research accurately?

What about confidentiality?

What about hallucinations?

These are sensible questions. We should ask them.

But after two days listening to founders, investors, engineers and business leaders, I realised almost nobody else is spending their time there.

They’ve moved on. They know AI isn’t perfect and they understand the risks, and they’ve answered those questions—put systems and processes in place to ensure AI is working effectively for them.

And now they’re asking much bigger questions. They’re asking what their businesses should look like now that AI exists.

That’s the conversation the legal profession urgently needs to start having.

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The moment I realised law is having the wrong conversation

One thing became obvious within the first few hours. People weren’t talking about ChatGPT prompts; they weren’t comparing drafting tools; and they weren’t obsessing over whether AI occasionally gets something wrong.

The conversations were about infrastructure. Enterprise deployment. Agentic workflows. Data. Compute. Governance. How organisations redesign themselves around AI.

It struck me that AI wasn’t being discussed as another piece of software; it was being discussed as something that changes the way businesses operate from the ground up.

In that moment I realised the legal profession is looking at AI through a very different lens. We’re still asking whether we should trust it. Everyone else is asking what becomes possible because it exists.

Those are completely different conversations.

Why the rest of business has already moved beyond hallucinations

I was interested to hear what people at this conference thought about the legal profession’s continued obsession with hallucinations. The response surprised me, but also didn’t.

“We solved that problem two years ago.”

They didn’t mean hallucinations no longer happen—of course they do. Generative AI will continue to make mistakes. The point was something much bigger. Businesses have accepted that AI needs oversight. Just as people need oversight. Humans make mistakes every day. Junior employees make mistakes. Senior employees make mistakes. We don’t abandon people because they’re imperfect. We train them, supervise them. We build systems around them.

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That’s exactly how many businesses now think about AI: Training, guardrails, testing, review, accountability. The discussion has shifted from “Can AI ever be perfect?” to “How do we build reliable systems around it?”

Meanwhile, I still hear lawyers speaking as though hallucinations are the single question that determines whether AI has a future. They aren’t—and this is what worries me.

Hallucinations have almost become an excuse to postpone the harder conversation. The reason not to change. As long as we focus on hallucinations, we don’t have to talk about pricing, business models, client expectations, changing lawyer roles, firm structures.

Hallucinations are the easy conversation. Transformation is the difficult one.

The difference between using AI and redesigning a business around AI

For me, this was the biggest lesson from Paris. There is an enormous difference between using AI and building a business around AI. Adding AI to document drafting is using AI. Generating meeting notes is using AI. Summarising emails is using AI. Useful? Absolutely. Transformational? Not really. The businesses at RAISE weren’t looking for isolated efficiencies.

They were redesigning customer journeys; changing internal processes; changing how decisions are made; changing how products are created; changing the experience customers receive.

Pallavi Mahajan, CTAIO at Nokia talked about how they are effectively giving their employees unlimited access to AI. And her definition of return on investment has nothing to do with budget. Her focus is on business outcomes, improving outcomes, and doing better for customers. I found this fascinating. How often are we having that conversation in the legal profession?

Instead of asking, “Where can AI save us ten minutes?”, these businesses are asking, “If we were starting this business today, knowing AI exists, how would we build it?”

That’s a question I rarely hear asked in legal services.

And I think we should be asking it every day.

Meanwhile, the ground is starting to move from under us. You’ve probably heard of Garfield, the first fully AI-powered law firm authorised by the UK’s Solicitors Regulation Authority, which specialises in small business debt recovery and small claims.

Then Keith made headlines, with three legal clients, frustrated by the real estate process, in the process of creating an AI-native firm, which automates 80% of traditionally human residential real estate workflows and has a 24/7 AI-powered client helpline.

So far, much of the news seems to have focused on the consumer-level legal practice areas—debt claim, real estate, immigration. But there are AI-native law firms springing up looking at the B2B market, with the likes of Agile Counsel focused on cross-border startup, VC and M&A matters; Three Points Law, a boutique firm focused on sports and tech law, which integrates AI into legal workflows with value-based fees; and Pierson Ferdinand, which launched with over 130 senior partners (and now up to 300) and zero junior lawyers, and uses AI to replace the associate layer entirely, with a focus on high-stakes litigation, M&A, regulatory compliance, employment law, and IP management for global clients.

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And now we have Norm AI, a full-stack legal AI company combining proprietary AI technology with a regulated law firm business, Norm Law, actively pursuing the BIgLaw market. If the top end of the market thought it was safe from what was going on elsewhere, it should think again. No practice area is untouchable; and no size of firm is either.

According to The AI Firm Index, there are currently 57 AI-native legal practices around the world—whether new entrants or dedicated units in established firms.

AI-native firms aren’t the future; they’re the here and now.

Why this changes what lawyers should actually be learning

For years I’ve argued that lawyers need to become trusted advisors rather than document drafters. My experience at RAISE has only strengthened that belief. AI will continue getting better at production work: drafting, research, summaries, analysis—these are increasingly the world of AI, and it’s only going to keep moving in that direction.

That doesn’t make lawyers less valuable; it changes where our value sits. Clients have never wanted documents for the sake of documents. They want confidence and judgement. They want someone who understands the commercial implications of a decision. They want someone who can help them choose between several possible paths when there isn’t one obvious answer.

That’s the work I believe becomes more valuable, not less. And it makes me wonder why we still spend so much of our time training lawyers to become exceptional producers of documents instead of exceptional advisors.

Law schools, professional training, Law firms—all of us need to start asking whether we’re preparing lawyers for the work AI is leaving behind or the work AI is taking away.

We need to stop training lawyers like we have for the world as it was 50 years ago and start training them for the world as it is today.

That means human skills: creativity, EQ, judgement, communication, leadership, business development.

The lawyers of the future aren’t document drafters—they’re advisors. Stop training them to just draft documents and train them to be strategic advisors.

I’m not saying that drafting and research are no longer important as part of a lawyer’s training. But there is so much more to a lawyer’s role that has been lost over the last few decades that we need to put more emphasis on. I keep hearing that lawyers learn judgement from drafting agreements. That’s just not true. I was a law firm client (through my role in a trust and company management firm), where we were working on a multi-million dollar property investment deal. When the draft agreement came through for review, I spotted a clause that we couldn’t fulfil, so I went back to our lawyer and asked that it be removed. “But that’s a standard clause ,” was the response I got. “Well, we can’t fulfil that obligation in practice, so it has to go,” I said. Back came the “standard clause” response. After repeating this twice more, I had to request to speak to another lawyer on the team, who, using their years of experience in matters like these, dealt with the matter and removed the clause.

That first lawyer didn’t gain new knowledge and judgement through drafting; he learned it from the experience of understanding how that clause would impact us as clients and our ability to fulfil obligations in real life, as opposed to what was written on the page.

Lawyers don’t gain those human skills from drafting contracts and researching case law. They learn it from sitting in on meetings with senior lawyers and clients, listening to the conversations, asking questions, providing insights, and experiencing the high and lows of deals and matters.

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AI struggles most where there is uncertainty, accountability, competing commercial priorities, and human emotion. These are the environments clients already pay lawyers for, but the profession’s failure to articulate this has meant they don’t really understand it. This has to change. Human skills are where they’ll learn it.

The real threat isn’t AI. It’s believing our business model doesn’t have to change

Whenever I talk about AI, someone says they aren’t worried because clients will always need lawyers.

I agree, clients will continue to need lawyers. I’m far less convinced they’ll always need law firms that operate exactly as they do today.

That’s the distinction I think many lawyers are missing. Law isn’t only a profession, it’s a business, and every part of that business is now being affected.

Marketing, sales, client onboarding. Finance, knowledge management, operations. Customer service, project management, pricing.

Every conversation in law starts with legal risk. Every conversation in Paris started with business opportunity. That’s why I think we’re falling behind.

I’m not suggesting we should brush over or ignore risk, but risk is a part of business, and we shouldn’t let it stop the profession from moving forward.

If every other industry is redesigning itself while we continue debating whether AI sometimes invents a case citation, we risk missing the much bigger shift taking place around us.

And it’s not that business understands AI better than law. What I keep coming back to is that many law firms still don’t think of themselves as businesses first. And if you don’t think like a business, you won’t redesign like one.

This got me thinking about London’s Hackney Carriage black taxis. My dad was a black taxi driver. Hailing a taxi has always been a problem. When London is busy, you try finding a black taxi with its light on to hail.

Before Uber launched in the UK, three taxi drivers created Hailo. Made exclusively for black taxis, a customer could hail a cab through an app and nearby a taxi would accept the ride and come and pick you up from where you were waiting.

Sounds brilliant, right? A modernised taxi industry that worked better for customers. Except it got almost zero traction among the black taxi community. They didn’t like the idea of payments going through the app.

Hailo eventually became Free Now, and Uber completely transformed the cab hailing business, with black taxis in decline ever since.

The black cab drivers thought they were protecting their industry. What they were actually protecting was the way the industry had always worked. Those aren’t the same thing.

History is full of industries that believed they were protected because their expertise was too specialist to change. Very few of them were.

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Four questions every law firm leader should be asking today

I came home from Paris with more questions than answers. I think they’re the questions that matter most.

If you were starting your law firm today, knowing everything you now know about AI, would you build it the same way?

If AI reduced production work dramatically over the next five years, what would clients still happily pay you for?

Are you training your lawyers to produce legal work, or to become advisors clients can’t imagine working without?

And perhaps the biggest question of all.

Are you preparing your firm for the future that’s arriving? Or are you still preparing it for the one that’s disappearing?

Law is a profession that has always been slow to change. I don’t think it’s because lawyers dislike technology—most lawyers I know love technology. I actually think they’re slow because they’ve never had to redesign themselves as businesses. And I understand why. Lawyers pride themselves on seeing what they do as a noble profession. The idea of seeing law as a business can make it feel a little dirty. This is a problem that lawyers need to overcome because it is damaging our future. There is a balance needed, no doubt, but right now that balance does not favour the business side at all. And we’re just starting to see what happens when we ignore the business side because AI is exposing the parts of the profession that should probably have changed years ago.

Those two days in Paris didn’t convince me that AI is replacing lawyers. They convinced me that AI is changing what it means to be one. The firms that recognise that early have an extraordinary opportunity. The ones that don’t may wake up one day wondering why the market changed without them.

Now is the time to reimagine what it means to be a lawyer. You can start that journey with The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®️—the complete toolkit for turning laywers into rainmakers. Get it now at the Legal Balance Institute website.

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When I teach lawyers how to do business development, we don’t start with strategy.

We start with action.

Because strategy without action gets you nowhere.

You might have a beautifully written business development plan. It might look impressive sitting on your desk or saved neatly in a folder on your computer. But if you look back in 12 months and nothing has changed, what was the point?

Strategy isn’t the problem; action is the problem.

And the reason you aren’t taking action is probably simpler than you think.

I don’t buy the argument that you don’t have time. Here’s why:

You can do a lot with five minutes a day and one meaningful activity. A quick message. A follow-up. Sharing an insight. Checking in with a client. Yet most lawyers don’t do it consistently.

So if time isn’t the problem, what is?

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It’s that the activity doesn’t lead to an instant result. It doesn’t give you instant gratification.

You send an email and nobody replies. You post on LinkedIn and hardly anyone engages. You follow up after a meeting and don’t hear back. You attend a networking event and no work comes from it.

After a while, it starts to feel pointless. That’s where the real problem begins because without realising it, you’ve made business development about you. About getting a response. About winning work. About proving that what you’re doing is working.

Instead of making it about the client.

And I see this so often.

Lawyers tell me they’re frustrated because they aren’t getting results from their business development activities.

But when I ask them what they mean by “results”, they usually mean immediate responses.

An email reply; a meeting booked; an instruction received; a new client.

What they’re really saying is: “I did something and nobody rewarded me for it.”

The problem is that legal services don’t work like that.

Law is a complex sale. Clients aren’t buying a pair of shoes or choosing where to have lunch. They’re making decisions that can affect—even transform—their businesses, families, finances, reputations and futures. These are often some of the most important decisions they will ever make.

And people don’t make those decisions quickly.

Think about this contradiction for a moment.

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Most lawyers understand that clients need time to build trust before they instruct a lawyer. Yet those same lawyers expect business development activities to produce immediate results. We tell ourselves that clients need time to think, then become disappointed when they do exactly that.

So you tell yourself your business development isn’t working when, in fact, you’re measuring it against the wrong thing.

Business development often doesn’t come with immediate responses.

The point of business development is to build trust and mindshare.

That’s it.

The client who receives your email today might not need you for another twelve months.

The person who sees your LinkedIn post might not have a legal issue right now.

The prospect who doesn’t respond to your follow-up may still be reading every piece of content you share.

You don’t know what’s happening inside their head.

What you need to know is this:

If you disappear, they won’t remember you. If you stop showing up, they won’t build trust in you. If you only reach out when you want something, you’ll become forgettable and the relationship will always feel transactional.

Business development works because it creates space for you in the client’s mind before they need you.

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And that’s where many lawyers struggle because there is no immediate reward for doing the right thing. No dopamine hit, no instant validation.

Just consistency. And consistency…well, that can feel uncomfortable.

Especially when you’re already worried about whether you’re doing it correctly.

A lot of lawyers tell me they don’t have time for business development. When we dig a little deeper, what they really mean is that they’re afraid the effort won’t pay off. They’re afraid of rejection, afraid of being ignored, afraid of looking foolish, afraid of putting themselves out there and getting nothing back.

So they stop. And it’s got nothing to do with not having capacity. It’s the absence of an immediate result feeling like failure.

And what I want you to take from reading this is that it isn’t failure—it’s how trust is built.

Nobody plants a seed in the morning and digs it up in the afternoon to see if it’s growing. Yet that’s exactly how many lawyers approach business development. They do one activity, wait for a result, don’t get one, and move on to something else. Then wonder why nothing changes.

Trust doesn’t work like that. Mindshare doesn’t work like that. Clients don’t work like that.

So my advice to you is simple.

Stop focusing on the response. Stop measuring success by whether someone replies today. Instead, focus on doing one thing that genuinely helps your clients achieve better outcomes.

Share an insight. Answer a question. Introduce someone useful. Send an article. Follow up with something that will add value.

Then do it again tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Because even when people don’t respond, they’re paying attention. Even when they don’t engage, they’re forming opinions. Even when they don’t instruct you today, they’re deciding whether you’re someone worth trusting tomorrow.

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If your measure of successful business development is whether somebody replies immediately, you’ve misunderstood what business development is.

If you think Business development is collecting responses, then you’ve got it all wrong and it’s why you’re not getting results.

Because business development is building trust, and trust compounds long before it converts.

Rainmakers don’t expect immediate results. They persist, stay visible, useful and relevant long enough to become the obvious choice when the client is ready.

The challenge isn’t finding five minutes.

The challenge is knowing what to do with those five minutes and having the confidence to keep going when the results aren’t immediate.

That’s exactly why I created The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®️.

Most lawyers already know they should be doing business development. What they don’t know is how to do it consistently, how to build trust without feeling salesy, and how to turn small daily actions into long-term client relationships.

The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®️ teaches lawyers how to sell legal services in a way that feels natural, authentic, and client-focused. It gives you the structure, tools, and mindset to become the kind of trusted advisor clients choose when the time is right.

If you’re tired of starting and stopping your business development, and you’re ready to build a practice around trust, visibility, and meaningful client relationships, The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®️ will show you how.

Ready to take your business development to a different level? Visit the Legal Balance Institute website and learn more about The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®️.

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Why does the legal profession insist on believing that doing more of the wrong thing will produce a better outcome?

We all know that the legal profession’s industry average write-off is 20%, and yet the prevailing thought is that more time recording—whether that’s through constant reminders, new technology, or more training—will produce better outcomes.

But if 20% is being written off, perhaps the problem isn’t that lawyers aren’t recording enough time. Perhaps the problem is that clients don’t want to buy time in the first place.

The one question that law firms don’t ask is: what do clients want from their lawyers?

The research shows that clients overwhelmingly want an end to the billable hour. Lawyers didn’t train to go into this profession to record time, and yet there they are, forced to do it every single day.

And still we keep trying to improve the measurement system rather than questioning whether we’re measuring the right thing.

Now AI is here and the legal profession is responding to an AI-driven value crisis by doubling down on the very metric AI is destroying:

Record your time more accurately.

At exactly the moment when time is becoming less relevant.

I’ve been writing and talking about this for a while, but AI doesn’t create the problem. It exposes the problem that was already there.

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For decades lawyers could point to effort: Research took hours. Drafting took days. Due diligence took weeks. AI is cutting those timelines dramatically.

But if the same outcome can be achieved in a quarter of the time, what exactly are we selling?

This is where things get uncomfortable for lawyers because many still answer:

“Time.”

Which immediately creates a problem. If time equals value, then every improvement in technology makes lawyers less valuable.

That’s absurd. Nobody seriously believes a lawyer becomes less valuable because they can solve a problem or provide an outcome faster. Nobody would tell a heart surgeon:

“I know you’ve spent 20 years learning this procedure, but because it only took you 30 minutes, I’m paying less.”

The profession knows this, yet it continues to price as if it doesn’t.

The legal profession faces an existential crisis of its own making and there’s still time to do something about it.

I don’t think the greatest danger to the profession is AI; it’s lawyers themselves.

Imagine AI becomes so good that a task that once took ten hours now takes ten minutes. What should happen? Most lawyers immediately jump to the wrong answer. They think that either the fee would have to fall or their hourly rate would have to rise to make up for the time lost.

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Ironically, from the client’s perspective, the outcome hasn’t become less valuable. The speed has become more valuable and created a better outcome. And clients pay more for better outcomes every day.

But why would they pay more when lawyers keep talking about time and effort? Why wouldn’t clients demand lower fees if that’s the conversation lawyers keep having?

Then there’s lawyers.

I don’t know many lawyers who went to law school dreaming about six-minute units.

Yet an entire profession spends millions of hours every year recording time, reconstructing time, defending time, writing off time, and arguing about time.

Meanwhile clients want certainty and transparency, lawyers want autonomy and purpose, and AI wants efficiency and effectiveness.

And the billable hour fights all of them.

Despite all of this, time recording persists because, apparently, you can’t measure profitability without recording time. This is a complete fallacy borne out of how law firms run matters and measure their lawyers’ time and worth.

The argument that law firms need time recording to measure profitability sounds sensible until you stop and think about it.

What time recording actually measures is cost allocation. It tells you how many hours someone spent on a matter and allows you to attach a cost to those hours. That isn’t profitability.

I accept that humans can only work for finite amounts of time, so measuring what they do is a simple way to understand how people spend their day. But that isn’t profitability and it isn’t productivity either. It only tells us what people were doing, not how effectively they were doing it.

Profitability is the difference between what it costs to deliver something and what a client is willing to pay for it. This distinction matters because almost every successful business on the planet measures profitability without recording every minute spent by every employee.

A restaurant doesn’t ask chefs to record six-minute units before calculating whether a dish is profitable.

A software company doesn’t require developers to track every moment spent writing code before deciding whether a product makes money.

A manufacturer doesn’t measure profitability by timing how long an engineer stares at a machine.

They manage projects, resources, budgets, outputs, and outcomes. Law firms are the outlier. The profession has convinced itself that because lawyers sell expertise, profitability can only be understood through time recording. Yet time recording often tells us very little about whether a matter was successful.

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In fact, it can actively distort decision-making:

Imagine two lawyers complete exactly the same task. One takes six hours; the other takes three. Under a time-based system, the six-hour lawyer appears more productive because they generated more billable time. Yet the three-hour lawyer delivered the same outcome in half the time.

If we genuinely care about effectiveness, client service, efficiency, and profitability, the second lawyer created more value. The problem is that time recording struggles to distinguish between effort and effectiveness. It measures activity. It doesn’t measure impact.

And as AI continues to reduce the time required for drafting, research, and analysis, this problem becomes even more obvious. If a task that once took eight hours now takes two, has the lawyer become less profitable? Or have they become more effective? Most clients would say the latter. Many law firms still measure the former. That’s why law firms and clients have never been aligned. One side benefits when matters take longer. The other benefits when they don’t. It’s why clients have never truly brought lawyers into their inner circle of trust.

Project management offers a far better lens through which to view legal work. Projects focus on scope, resources, budgets, risks, deadlines, communication, and outcomes. They ask:

What are we trying to achieve?

Who is best placed to do each task?

What should this cost?

What risks could affect delivery?

How do we keep the client informed?

Those are profitability questions. Whether someone spent 2.3 hours or 2.8 hours on a particular email chain is not.

Every successful project starts with a destination. The legal profession starts with a stopwatch.

Projects define success before the work begins. That’s what project management does.

Law remains one of the few professions that often starts by measuring effort rather than defining success.

We don’t ask, “What outcome are we trying to achieve?”

We ask, “How many hours will this take?”

When lawyers set out matters as projects, assigning the best people to do specific tasks most effectively, with deadlines set and proper communication in place, time recording becomes redundant.

Lawyers don’t want to record time and clients don’t want to pore through timesheets—they all have better things to do.

The legal profession often talks as though time recording and profitability are inseparable. They aren’t. Time recording is simply one method of collecting data. It is not profitability itself. And as technology continues to reduce the amount of time required to deliver legal services, the profession needs to decide whether it wants to measure time or manage performance.

Those are no longer the same thing.

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And there is a bigger point lurking underneath this:

Law firms say they need time recording to understand profitability. But if that were entirely true, why do firms with decades of time recording data still struggle with write-offs, write-downs, budgeting, forecasting and pricing confidence?

The legal profession has been collecting time data for 70 years. If time recording was the answer to profitability, we’d have solved profitability by now.

Firms aren’t measuring the wrong thing poorly; they’re measuring the wrong thing brilliantly.

At its heart, this is a leadership problem. Regardless of how time recording and billable hours came into the profession, it was law firm leaders who decided that time would become the primary measure of value, productivity, performance, profitability, promotion, and success.

And if AI is exposing weaknesses in that model, the answer cannot be to ask lawyers to record their time more accurately. The answer is to rethink the model itself.

AI isn’t forcing firms to rethink pricing, profitability, or performance. AI is exposing that those conversations should have happened years ago.

There is so much focus right now on whether and how to implement AI in law firms. That’s not actually the biggest challenge facing law firm leaders. It’s whether they’re willing to rethink the systems AI is making impossible to ignore.

And this is where the profession has to look in the mirror. Every major advance should have been a warning: Email, document automation, workflow tools, online research, AI. Each one reduced the time needed to perform legal work.

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And instead of asking: “How do we communicate value differently?”, the profession asked: “How do we record the remaining time more accurately?”

It still does, to this very day. That’s the behaviour of an industry blindly protecting a system rather than serving a market.

And AI makes that harder to ignore because every improvement in efficiency reduces the usefulness of time as a management metric while increasing the importance of scope, outcomes, client experience and value.

The profession isn’t suffering from a lack of time data. It’s drowning in it. Is all that data helping firms make better decisions? Or is it simply reinforcing an increasingly outdated way of thinking?

The billable hour and time recording don’t work. We know this. The research has been telling us for years. But here we are, persisting with both while clients increasingly experiment with AI tools for questions they would once have taken to a lawyer.

Why?

Because AI gives them something the legal profession has struggled to provide: speed, accessibility, and certainty.

It doesn’t matter that the answer may be wrong. People are willing to try it because they are getting something they have been asking lawyers for over generations and rarely received.

We’re still arguing over whether AI will change legal services. It already has. The simple fact that we are spending so much time talking and writing about AI is proof of that.

So the question now is: will lawyers keep measuring their value using a metric that technology is making less relevant every day?

Because if your business model depends on clients buying more time, you’re betting against every technological advance that follows.

And that’s not a fight you’re going to win.

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There are lots of top tips lists for winning work on the internet.

And on the surface, they’re hard to argue with. They sound sensible, logical, even reassuring.

But I’ve realised the problem isn’t that lawyers don’t know these ideas—it’s that they’ve never been shown how to actually apply them in a way that feels natural, builds trust, and leads to real conversations.

There’s no script anyone can give you that will improve your business development.

It’s a shift in how you think, how you show up, and how you guide clients through decisions that actually matter.

And, most importantly, when you have so much going on, it’s about keeping it simple.

That’s why these 10 shifts are actions you can take today without having to spend weeks practising before you get started.

1. Do your homework before you open your mouth

I’ve seen too many lawyers walk into client or prospect conversations hoping to figure it out as it happens. That’s a risk you don’t need to take. Take the time to understand what’s going on in their world—the pressures, the priorities, what success looks like for them. When you do, the conversation stops being about you and starts feeling relevant to them.

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2. Earn trust in the first few minutes

People decide quickly whether they feel comfortable with you. Not because of what you know, but how you interact with them. Focus on being present, listening properly, and showing you understand what’s at stake. Small talk builds rapport; presence and understanding build trust.

3. Ask questions that actually move the conversation forward

There’s a big difference between gathering information and creating insight. Try to ask questions that make the client stop and think, not just respond. That’s where your value starts to show up. Here’s a question you can use every time to show you know your stuff: “Have you thought about trying [x]?” Simple, yet so effective.

4. Speak clearly about the difference you make

If you can’t explain why working with you matters, the client won’t bother trying to figure it out, so don’t be afraid to talk about how you help clients. Focus on outcomes, not process. What changes for them if they work with you? That’s the conversation clients care about.

5. Treat pushback as part of the process, not a problem

This is my favourite part of any client or prospect conversation. Why? Because it keeps me on my toes and ensures I’m always looking to add and create value for them. When someone hesitates, don’t see it as rejection, see it as a signal that they want to understand better. Either you haven’t made things clear enough, or something important hasn’t been addressed yet. It’s an opportunity for you to go deeper, not back off.

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6. Help them see why waiting costs them

Most clients don’t need pressure—they need perspective. Help them understand what happens if nothing changes. What’s the risk of delay? What’s the impact of doing nothing? That’s where momentum comes from.

7. Look for alignment, not compromise

The best outcomes don’t come from meeting in the middle. They come from understanding what really matters to both sides and finding a way forward that makes sense commercially and practically. So ask your client or prospect what matters most.

8. Guide the decision instead of hovering around it

I see this all the time: great conversation and rapport; lots of value and insight shared. And then…nothing. A lot of lawyers wait for the client to make the move. You shouldn’t. If it feels like the right fit, say so and suggest the next step. Clients want direction, so take the cognitive load off them by helping them move forward.

9. Stay present after the conversation ends

This is where most lawyers disappear. And it’s why so many good opportunities go nowhere. I teach my clients to follow up with something useful—an idea, a perspective, something that shows they’re still thinking about their client’s situation. And then to keep following up. The client or prospect may not always respond, but they will be grateful that you’re passing on helpful information, and hat’s how relationships build over time.

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10. Treat every interaction as feedback

Every conversation tells you something—what worked, what didn’t, where you lost momentum. Pay attention to that, write it down (or put it in your CRM, preferably!), and adjust. That’s how you get better, not by attending another one-off training session that you forget a week later.

What you have to remember is this:

None of this is about ‘being good at sales’—whatever that means. It’s about showing up as the kind of lawyer clients actually want to work with—someone who understands them, challenges them when needed, and helps them move forward with confidence.

And that’s a shift most lawyers were never taught.

Are you ready to make the real shift? The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®️is where that change happens.

Get it now at www.legalbalanceinstitute.com.

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I’ve seen a few posts recently on the subject of estimating under the billable hour and how to avoid complaints. I want to address the great big elephant in the room that you cannot get away from: underestimating to win the work.

All the advice I read focuses on managing expectations and having continuous clear communication. That’s great—it’s how it should be, but it doesn’t deal with the tendency for lawyers and law firms to set the estimate lower than they truly expect it to come out at because they want to win this work or they want to win this client. And hey, I get it. When your mindset is, “I need to pay the bills, so I need to win this work,” it’s tempting to estimate even just a little bit lower. Because after all, estimates are estimates; and in our heads we tell ourselves that clients understand this and appreciate there is a good chance that the bill will come in higher once the full scope becomes clear and we know what we are really dealing with.

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Now, this is largely a business development problem and it’s why I do what I do. When you have a big pipeline of opportunities, your pricing becomes robust and you don’t aim to win every client because you realise not every client is a good fit. Let me tell you now, you will not overcome any pricing issues if you do not overcome your business development issues.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we put ourselves in a position where we feel we have to underestimate?

I’ve seen it all:

The fear of not having enough work; fear of rejection; fear of losing to a cheaper lawyer or law firm. I’ve worked with lawyers whose identities are tied to being the one who wins the client. These are all fixed, limiting beliefs that lead to poor behaviours and poorer outcomes.

But let’s set this aside for another time. If you estimate for work and you choose trying to win the client over an honest estimate... Well, the clue is in the word—honest. It is dishonest to put in an estimate that you know or believe you cannot meet. That’s tough to read, and I get it. You’re trying to win work, not mislead clients. No one wants to be told that sometimes they act in dishonest ways. But if we’re to truly move forward as a profession, I think we do need to have honest and uncomfortable conversations like this.

If your estimates are genuinely honest—based on your experience, your data, and a proper understanding of the work—then then there’s a question you need to ask yourself:

Why are you still calling them estimates?

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We tell ourselves an estimate is just that—an estimate. It’s flexible, so it’s subject to change. It’s a guide, not a promise.

But that’s not how the client sees it. They see a number and they anchor to it. In their mind, that’s the price they’re likely to pay. So when the matter starts to drift beyond that number, to lawyers it feels like natural movement, but to clients it feels like something has gone wrong.

And no amount of “we kept you updated” fixes that feeling because the issue isn’t communication; it’s where the risk sits. When you give an estimate, the client carries the risk of it being wrong. They’re the one who pays if it runs over. They’re the one left wondering how it got so far away from what they were told at the start.

Now compare that to a quote. A quote says something very different: “This is the scope. This is the price. And if nothing changes, this is what you’ll pay.”

You’re giving clarity and certainty. And most importantly, you’re taking responsibility for the thinking upfront, rather than leaving the uncertainty to play out later.

Of course, scope can change—matters evolve, things come up. That’s part of legal work. But that doesn’t mean everything has to be uncertain from day one. It means you define what you do know, and when something changes, you have the conversation and reset the price—you don’t let it drift.

Most estimates aren’t just uncertain, they’re lowered to win the work and feel competitive because we’re not sure where the next instruction is coming from.

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At that point, it’s no longer “how do I estimate better?”; It’s “why should anyone rely on my estimates at all?”

And for all your excuses, ultimately, under the billable hour, there is little incentive to innovate, or to work faster and more effectively. That third run-through ‘just to check’? It added no value to the client, but you’re charging the client for it.

And all this while underestimating the amount it would cost the client.

It plays out as ‘underestimation + billable hours = win the work cheaply → recover it later through time → client frustration.’

Is it any wonder clients complain?

So here’s my challenge to you:

Go back and look at your last ten estimates and ask yourself honestly:

Which of them did you truly believe you could deliver on?

Where did you tell yourself, “It’ll probably come in a bit higher, but that’s okay”?

Because that’s the moment this starts: right at the beginning—when you set a number you weren’t fully confident in. Not when the bill goes over or when the client questions it.

And then ask yourself a harder question:

Why did you do it?

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Was it because you needed the work? Because you didn’t want to lose the client? Because you thought someone else would come in cheaper? Because you weren’t sure where the next opportunity was coming from?

Because then we’re talking about a business development issue, not a pricing issue.

When your pipeline is strong, when you’re having the right conversations with the right clients, you don’t feel the need to win everything. And when you don’t feel the need to win everything, you stop lowering your numbers to get a yes and start setting them properly.

And when that happens, everything else changes along with it: your pricing, your confidence, your client relationships, and the way clients experience working with you.

So the question isn’t:

“How do I avoid underestimating?”

It’s:

“What needs to change so I don’t feel like I have to?”

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Good news: the billable hour is dead.

No doubt you’ve heard that statement for the last thirty to forty years. And clients have been wishing for it for the same amount of time. Yet the billable hour remains the predominant business model in legal services, and has been for the last sixty to seventy years.

I’m not going to use this article to tell you about the history of the billable hour, except to say that it was never meant to be this way. Time recording was introduced in an attempt to better understand productivity, though even that is a failure to understand how humans work. What it transformed into was the system as you see it today.

And even with the advent of the internet, email, document automation, spreadsheets—with each advance has come the shout that the billable hour would no longer be able to withstand such progress. If anything, it has gained strength. Now, it hasn’t gained in popularity, and the explosion in work from the 1980s and 1990s onwards has not come about as a result of more time saved because of technology, but outside factors such as greater access to money, creation of new businesses on a scale not seen before, and geopolitics. These factors have filled the gaps created by improved technology. It has also put increased pressure on the billable hour. Stats show increased write-offs, lower client satisfaction, and growing demand for fixed, upfront pricing.

So what’s changed? Why am I saying the billable hour is dead? And why should you take this seriously? After all, 97% of law firms still use the billable hour as their principal billing method.

Well, let’s first look at it from the client perspective. Research from the likes of BigHand, Clio, and Thomson Reuters shows the demand for greater transparency and certainty in pricing has never been greater. It grows every single year. Clients want to be able to make informed decisions about what they’re buying before they go ahead, and the billable hour, with its estimates, doesn’t allow for that certainty.

The billable hour is also incredibly opaque. Clients have no idea how long a lawyer actually spent working on a matter or why it took them so long. If they ask for timesheets, those often don’t tell clients very much about the work. In fact, a recent report in the UK Law Society Gazette revealed a US law firm billing its client $34million in a litigation matter that came with hardly any descriptions about the work that had been done.

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You might want to be able to fully explain to clients how you are spending your time. I know legal businesses that spend days updating timesheets with better descriptions. Team members updating timesheets instead of helping clients—and all non-billable. Money thrown down the toilet.

And the fact is, clients don’t care how long something took you. They don’t care about your effort. They don’t even care about the document that you produce. They simply want the outcome that comes from working with you, what working with a legal advisor empowers them to do.

Here is where AI can offer the greatest paradigm shift seen in legal services. In November 2022, ChatGPT came online, and in such a short space of time, we’ve gone from arguing that AI hallucinates cases to AI produces documents in seconds or minutes as opposed to hours, days, and weeks. I have clients who are using products and producing documents in 25% of the time it used to take. This presents an existential threat to the billable hour.

We have to remember that AI has really only just gotten started and that where we were three years ago isn’t where we are today, and where we are today isn’t where we’ll be in three years’ time. AI learns and improves at a pace humans cannot compare. And every time it makes a mistake, you teach it not to make that mistake again, and it doesn’t. It doesn’t eat, sleep, or get distracted, and it can work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And as we are seeing with agentic AI, that is exactly what is happening.

And if AI can do the work in 25% of the time under the billable hour, that’s 25% of the revenue. That isn’t just game-changing; that breaks the entire business model. Think for a moment about exactly what that means: What changes under the billable hour if the work gets done in 25% of the time? Well, for one thing, lawyers can no longer claim that their value is in their time and in their efforts. This creates a challenge and an opportunity.

The truth is that, for lawyers, their realm has been knowledge, and knowledge has been scarce. AI is creating an abundance of knowledge and is going to dramatically change how people obtain legal services. Jordan Furlong, a legal commentator, recently wrote an article that highlights the future issues for the legal profession.

He divides work into two types. Type one is production, which is the intellectual work that provides solutions, including research, summarising, drafting, revising, reasoning, and analysing. These are the traditional activities of lawyers, and they are predominantly billed in hours. In the future, this type of work will be done faster, cheaper, and frankly, better with AI. On top of that, much of this will be done directly by clients, or it will be embedded into systems and platforms that reduce the need for lawyers’ involvement. David Bushby, Canva’s Head of Legal Operations, was recently interviewed on a podcast in which he explained how Canva is looking at bringing much more of their legal work in-house that they simply wouldn’t have had the capability to do before because of AI. And this will only continue.

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And perhaps you’ve seen the recent module updates from Perplexity and Claude. Perplexity recently introduced Computer for Taxes, where it will review tax returns and assess accuracy. According to its promotional material, in its own testing, it ‘found that deductions under the US 2025 No Tax on Overtime provisions were understated by 67%, leaving thousands of dollars unclaimed.’ Now let’s tell ourselves that it has oversold that number. Even if it found 5%, that’s still a huge value add. And, while it has started with the US tax system, how long before it moves east?

Claude for Word is an add-on that integrates Claude into Word workflows. According to its promotional materials, “It’s designed for professionals who work extensively with documents, particularly in legal review, financial memo drafting, and iterative editing.”

It picks out legal first. And the recent demo from Anthropic suggests it can really do the job.

Then there is the second type of work that Furlong describes: judgement—the higher value work that comes into play and is defined by unpredictability, complexity, and impact. This involves advice, guidance under uncertainty, dispute avoidance, strategic counsel, advocacy, risk prioritisation and mitigation, and high stakes accountability. These are the places that lead to the most uncertainty and hesitancy, and where clients want to know that they have someone on their side, not just with the technical knowledge, but the human experience behind it.

How much of the type two judgement will be done by AI in the future we simply don’t know. However, for the short and medium term, lawyers’ roles are going to shift into the realms of judgement, accountability, and advice, much more than the production side.

But why am I telling you this? Because lawyers need to understand how clients think and what your approach should be when talking to them about this shift away from the billable hour. Judgement isn’t defined by the number of hours you spend with clients. Judgement comes down to knowledge and experience that is gained through years of seeing these situations play out both positively and negatively. And while AI is very good at telling us what the optimal outcome will be, humans aren’t known for always taking the optimal path.

So what does this mean for the billable hour? As time shrinks, the value of that judgement doesn’t. In fact, it grows larger. Clients will continue to go to lawyers; and they will demand faster outcomes because faster outcomes are better outcomes.

Imagine for a moment that you are a client and I’m a tax advisor. I tell you that, because of my twenty years of knowledge and experience, I can have £1million in your bank account in thirty days, and it’s going to cost you £50,000, I would imagine that you would say, “yes, please, where do I sign up?”

What if I said to you that, because of my knowledge and experience, I can get the money to you in one week—would you be happier or less happy to pay the £50,000? Of course you’d be happier because you’re now getting it three weeks earlier than you thought you would. Better outcome.

In fact, I can get it to you tomorrow. My twenty years of knowledge and experience mean that I can get you that £1million tomorrow. You’re going to hand me the £50,000 because you’re getting the money tomorrow.

When we put our house on the market a few years ago, the real estate agent’s fee was 1.5%. I actually didn’t expect the house to sell for the price we wanted, and I thought it would be weeks, if not months, before it sold. The agent would really have to work to get that price. No, within 24 hours, we had a buyer. Did I argue over the fee? No, I was delighted to pay it!

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We’ve spent decades pretending time equals value. It never did. And it’s why the billable hour has no place in the future. It has always been in those years of knowledge and experience that enable you to produce outcomes for them. And for the foreseeable future, AI’s role will be to assist in providing those faster, better outcomes. Just like we pay for faster delivery from the likes of DHL and Amazon, we don’t ask them to charge us less because they get it to us quicker. We pay more because it’s to our advantage.

This is the opportunity for lawyers and law firms. If you can say to a client, “the last time we did this work for you, our price was £10,000. This time, our price is still £10,000, and we can get you that outcome in half the time,” that’s a better outcome. It is an outcome that clients are happy to pay for. So this is an opportunity for both clients and advisors, and it’s an opportunity that neither should allow to pass by.

Clients, on the one hand, should expect transparency and certainty of price. They should expect that, before they make a decision about working with you, they know the price that they are going to pay for the work that is going to be undertaken. And they should expect greater use of technology to enable those faster, better outcomes.

For lawyers and law firms, this is the single greatest opportunity that has come your way. If you can do the work in half the time, yet still receive the same fee for that work, why would you stick to a business model that no longer rewards you? That punishes you for giving your clients better outcomes?

For lawyers, the window on leading this change is closing. Have you seen or read about Garfield and Keith? Garfield is an AI-native law firm in the UK that recently received regulatory approval, where individuals can now go through a small claims process on their own using AI-drafted documents that will be submitted on a client’s behalf. And all for under £200.

Think of the number of businesses that can claim for money they previously wouldn’t have because it was too expensive.

Keith has just obtained its first round of funding to create an AI-powered law firm that aims to automate the conveyancing process. If it succeeds—and over time it will—it will transform the conveyancing industry to the point that, one day perhaps, conveyancing won’t even require legal representation. Hard to imagine. Hard to fathom, I know. But conveyancing is ripe for AI; and, unlike Garfield that is headed up by lawyers, Keith is being created by, and I hate this term, ‘non-lawyers’ who have been repeatedly frustrated by the conveyancing process.

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But back to my point. There is a closing window to lead on this change. Client demand for transparency, certainty, use of technology, and faster outcomes will only increase. The likes of Garfield and Keith—we will see more of those to the point where leading on change will be taken out of our hands. Change forced upon us, which will then no longer be led by strategy, and which could very well end up being chaotic and catastrophic.

The need to move away from the billable hour has never been greater, and there are incredible alternatives that benefit lawyers, law firms, and clients alike. I work with a number of law firms in moving away from the billable hour and onto business models such as value pricing and subscriptions. These models give certainty on both sides. For clients, they know upfront exactly what they’re going to pay for and exactly what they are going to get, and should they require additional work or the scope change, they know that it will be discussed upfront before any additional work is done and a new price is agreed.

For lawyers and law firms, this is a paradigm shift that benefits you and your clients. It provides the basis of a real strategy for winning clients, improved cash flow and budgeting, and better client relationships. Just imagine putting in an invoice that isn’t questioned by the client because they agreed to that price and that’s the amount stated on the invoice. And with subscriptions, where you do ongoing work with clients, imagine knowing what you are getting in each month.

And while you might think that some areas of law lend themselves more to fixed pricing than others, I would ask you to search really deep and ask yourself if that is true, or if that is what you tell yourself because the fear of the unknown stops you from moving away from the billable hour.

The most common argument is litigation: how can you give a fixed price on a litigation matter when you don’t know whether it will settle tomorrow or go all the way to court. I welcome this argument because I think it is important. I also think it misunderstands how fixed pricing works. A fixed price doesn’t mean a price whether it settles tomorrow or goes to court. It means a fixed price for what you know is coming up. All legal matters follow some kind of process, especially litigation. In fact, this is why it lends itself so well to fixed pricing. Here you can strategise and price in stages, empowering clients to make fully-informed decisions at each turn, get to the next stage, strategise and price again. The matter never gets away from the client, where they end up forced to continue because they are too far in. And when they’re too far in, that’s not strategy, that’s being backed into a corner, and it’s not always where the best decisions are made. Staged pricing allows clients to maintain control. Isn’t that what our role should be: to advise clients who feel in control of their decisions?

And as legal advisors, I constantly read on websites saying that they are client-centric or client-focused. This is your opportunity to prove it because clients want certainty and transparency. You have the opportunity to lead on that change, to be strategic, to benefit your business, your employees, your clients, and your profession. Yes, it takes work. Yes, it takes time. But the time for inertia, the time for inactivity, is over. The time for strategic change is right now.

The disruption is happening all around us. You can lead this shift or you can wait until the market forces it on you, but that window is closing. I’m here to help you answer the how. Only you can answer the ‘why not?’.

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I keep seeing the same conversations pop up.

“AI hallucinates.”

“It can’t be trusted.”

“We just need to figure out how it fits into what we already do.”

And every time I read that, I think:

Have we completely missed what’s happening here?

Because this isn’t about whether AI can draft a clause or summarise a case. It’s about the fact that it’s getting very, very good at doing entire chunks of what lawyers currently get paid to do.

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The conversation is still stuck in the wrong place. Most of the legal profession is still focused on the edges: Drafting faster, researching quicker, automating bits of admin.

That’s fine, but it’s also dangerously narrow because AI isn’t just improving tasks; it’s connecting them. Workflows that used to take hours, days, or entire teams are being compressed into something much smaller, much faster, and much more accessible.

And while that’s happening, we’re still debating whether it gets footnotes right. That’s like arguing about the quality of a typewriter ribbon while someone else has just built Google Docs.

Can I tell you what else isn’t perfect? Computers, fax machines, the internet, mobile phones. But we joined those revolutions. So why does AI have to be perfect before we acknowledge how transformative it is?

I’ve realised it’s fear. Fear of what it means for our place in the world. If AI can do so much of our jobs, where will that leave us?

This isn’t a tech shift. It’s a role shift. If AI can draft documents, review contracts, pull together research, suggest structures and strategies, then we need to ask a much harder question:

What is left for the lawyer?

Because if your value is tied to producing documents or processing information, you’re standing on very shaky ground. The reality is this:

The things many lawyers built their careers on are becoming easier, faster, and in some cases, replaceable.

And no amount of “but it hallucinates” is going to stop that trajectory.

When you strip all of that away, something interesting happens. What’s left is the part clients have always cared about most:

“What should I do?”

“What does this mean for me?”

“What’s the risk if I get this wrong?”

“What would you do if you were in my position?”

You’ll notice none of that’s drafting or research. It’s judgement, commercial thinking, advice.

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And it’s the exact shift we’ve been talking about for years at Legal Balance Institute—lawyers moving from technicians to trusted advisors, sitting at the table before decisions are made, not just documenting them after.

AI doesn’t kill that role, it makes it more important.

But here’s where it gets uncomfortable. You can’t keep the same working model and just “add AI in.” It doesn’t work because the current model is built on time spent, tasks completed, and Inputs measured. And AI fundamentally breaks that. If a task that used to take 6 hours now takes 20 minutes, what exactly are you charging for?

We’ve already seen that the traditional billable hour model creates confusion and frustration for clients. AI doesn’t fix that problem; it exposes it. And that means pricing isn’t a side conversation anymore.

This is where most firms hesitate. They’ll invest in AI tools, run pilots, and encourage “innovation,” but they won’t touch pricing. And that’s the mistake because you can’t have faster delivery, less effort, and more automation, while still charging in a way that assumes the opposite.

At some point, the question becomes unavoidable:

If the work changes, shouldn’t the way we price it change too?

Clients aren’t interested in how long something takes. They want clarity, confidence, and a result they can rely on. They always have. AI just makes that impossible to ignore.

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The lawyers who win will look very different. The future lawyer isn’t the one who knows the most cases, or drafts the longest documents, or bills the most hours.

It’s the one who can sit in a room with a client and ask better questions, spot risks the client hasn’t considered, challenge the way a client thinks, translate complexity into clear decisions, and guide strategy, not just execute it. That’s a completely different skill set. And it’s not something lawyers were trained to do, which is exactly why so many are clinging to the old model—it’s familiar, it feels safe, and it’s what they know.

But safe doesn’t mean sustainable.

All of which means this is the moment to step back and ask yourself:

If AI took away the drafting and research tomorrow, where would I add value?

Am I involved early enough in my clients’ decision-making?

Do my conversations sound like a strategist or a technician?

Would a client pay for my thinking, even if the execution was instant?

Because that’s where this is heading. Not in five years. Now.

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I say this often: this isn’t about becoming more efficient; it’s about becoming more relevant.

And that means letting go of work that no longer defines your value, building the confidence to guide, not just respond, changing how you show up in client conversations. And, yes, changing how you price what you do.

This fear many lawyers have is unfounded—at least for now. Who can say how far AI will be able to go? For right now and the near future, AI is taking huge amounts of work off our desks that clients’ don’t value (drafting) and giving us back time to put towards what they do value (experience, strategic thinking, peace of mind, empathetic understanding).

It’s a bigger shift than most people expected, but it’s also a far more interesting one because the lawyers who make it won’t just survive this change. They’ll build better practices and careers that actually feel aligned with the impact they want to have.

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I want you to imagine something:

You’re a client. You’ve got multiple matters with the law firm you engage. Different practice areas, different partners, different invoices.

Something urgent lands on your desk from the CEO. Who do you call?

If the answer isn’t obvious in under three seconds, there’s a problem.

Research from BTI, a strategic insights consultancy, shows that 85% of clients aren’t exactly sure who leads their relationship with their law firm.

Eighty-five percent.

Let me say that differently: Only 15% of clients are certain who owns the relationship. If that statistic doesn’t make you uncomfortable, it should because what’s really happening is most law firms confuse activity with ownership.

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Law firms think:

“The billing partner owns it.”

“The partner who brought them in owns it.”

“The partner on the biggest matter owns it.”

Clients don’t see it that way. From their side, it looks like a litigator calling when there’s a dispute; a corporate partner appearing when there’s a deal; an employment lawyer when there’s a people issue. That’s not a relationship; that’s a series of transactions.

And when no single lawyer takes responsibility for the whole client—commercially, strategically, emotionally—the client feels it. They might not complain, but they don’t feel connected. And where there’s no ownership, there’s no loyalty. If a client doesn’t feel connected to one specific lawyer, they don’t feel loyalty to the firm. Because loyalty is personal.

It’s built on:

“She understands our business.”

“He always thinks two steps ahead.”

“She knows what’s going on before we tell her.”

Without that, you’re replaceable.

And what happens when a partner leaves? Well, here’s the irony: the client follows because their loyalty wasn’t to the logo; it was to the person who actually showed leadership.

If that person leaves and no one else has stepped into that role, the client doesn’t feel looked after, they feel unmanaged. And that’s when competitors move in.

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Large firms often tell themselves they’ve solved this. They have key client programmes, CRM systems, client listening exercises, relationship management teams. But the question that matters is:

Does the client know—without hesitation—who to call first? Not “who handles employment?” or “who’s on the deal?”or “who’s billing?” It’s “Who leads?”

Clients don’t want a relationship with a system, and they don’t want a relationship with someone who doesn’t know the law. They want a relationship with a lawyer. And when something goes wrong, they want one accountable person, not a committee.

Small firms shouldn’t get comfortable either. If you’re in a smaller firm or you’re a solo lawyer, you might be thinking: “This isn’t my issue.” But think back: Have there ever been moments in your career when a colleague assumed a client was “theirs”? Or a client started going directly to another partner? Or an opportunity wasn’t picked up because no one felt responsible for the bigger picture?

And what about now? How many clients would pick up the phone to you for a legal matter that you don’t practise? Or for something that isn’t a legal matter, but where you could actually help? That’s a problem because that’s where another lawyer can swoop in:

“Call me for anything. I may not practise that area of law—or it may not even be a legal matter—but I’ll know someone good who can help.”

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Ownership doesn’t become important when you’re big; it becomes important when you want to grow. Because the moment you’re no longer the only person working with that client, clarity matters.

And this isn’t just about client service; it’s about business development. When no one owns the relationship, no one is proactively asking bigger-picture questions; no one is identifying opportunities across practice areas; no one is systematically deepening the connection; no one is thinking 12 months ahead. You end up reactive, matter-led, task-driven.

That’s not how rainmakers operate. Rainmakers lead the client relationship, not just the file. They ask better questions, see patterns. They spot risks early, and connect dots across the firm. That’s how good lawyers become indispensable rainmakers.

Lucky for all of us, there’s a fix (and it’s not complicated).

I tell my clients: if you value a client, do this:

Decide who owns the relationship.

Tell the client clearly.

Make that person responsible for more than billing.

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And here’s the powerful bit—call your key clients and ask: “Who do you see as your primary point of contact here?” If you don’t like the answer, that’s data, not a crisis. But ignoring it? That’s a crisis waiting to happen.

The legal profession keeps talking about ‘client centricity’, but you can’t be client-centric if your client doesn’t know who leads.

The best lawyers take ownership, lead conversations, build trust beyond individual matters, and think commercially, not just technically. Because modern business development isn’t just about winning work; it’s about leading better and retaining the great clients you win.

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It feels like it was almost inevitable that the Law Society Gazette would release these two headlines on the same day recently:

‘Complaint numbers rocket to record high’

‘Record number of solicitors call mental health charity’

The stories themselves make for bleak reading:

Complaints to the Legal Ombudsman (‘LeO’) are up by 30% on the previous year.

Residential real estate (36%), personal injury (15%), and probate (14%) received the most complaints.

The Gazette highlighted complaints on service and communication being both high and the most upheld.

According to its Impact Report 2025, legal mental health charity LawCare reveals it had supported 753 people last year—more than in any previous year, including during the Covid pandemic.

42% were solicitors in private practice, 13% were trainees and 9% in-house solicitors.

70% of those who reached out to LawCare were women.

The most common issues that people contacted LawCare about were stress (41%), career concerns (39%) and anxiety (34%).

This comes as, just a few months ago, LawCare released their Life in the Law report 2025, which showed that nearly 90% of law firms surveyed considered mental health and wellbeing a priority.

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Meanwhile, research undertaken by Dr Emma Clarke found that law firms are psychologically unsafe places for employees, with lawyers feeling unable to be their true selves or admit when they were struggling.

Dr Clarke highlighted formal hierarchical structures, billable hours, and gendered differences when coping with stress as key contributors to feeling unsafe at work and major causes of lawyers not just leaving law firms, but leaving practice altogether.

You can read more about Emma’s findings here—I would highly recommend it.

And we can go further: in August 2025, business intelligence software provider Bighand released their ‘Legal Talent & Resourcing Report’, which found that attrition in the legal profession is worsening: junior and senior associates leaving the profession almost doubled in the preceding 12 months (from 9% to 16% and 17% respectively).

There’s a lot to unpack here.

The legal profession has a problem with customer service. In 2021, Insight6, a leading customer experience agency, conducted hundreds of secret customer calls and online chats to different professional services businesses across property, finance, accounting, and law. It used the Net Promoter Score system to rate the different professions on how they handle prospective customer enquiries and onboarding. The Net Promoter Score essentially asks a question, ‘How likely are you to recommend this firm to other people?’ and rates it from 1 to 10.

Nine and ten become advocates. Seven and eight are neutral, six and below are detractors. You take the percentage of advocates and deduct it from the percentage of detractors. To anchor this point, Amazon has a score of +53, Netflix +55, and Apple +56. Anything over zero is considered okay to good. 40 and above is excellent. 70 and above is considered world-class. The legal profession came in at -54, the lowest of all the professional services.

I should point out that, in the latest Insight6 report from 2025, the legal profession’s NPS has risen to -41, but it’s still incredibly poor. And if the relationship starts off poorly, you are always playing catch-up to redeem yourself and the firm, rather than starting off from a position of strength. Clients won’t forget their first impression of the firm.

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It can be argued that clients complain because they didn’t get the outcome they wanted and weren’t satisfied with the firm’s complaint process, not because they are unhappy with the service or communication. And that is a fair argument. We all know this happens. If we knew we were truly at fault, we would have accepted responsibility long before it went to the Legal Ombudsman.

But these are matters that have been independently reviewed by the LeO, with evidence of poor service found in 69% of complaints, and poor communication complaints upheld in 85% of cases. So while we can argue that not every complaint has merit, the overwhelming majority of them do.

And what does this mean for lawyers on the receiving end of these complaints? It is no coincidence that LawCare received a record number of calls last year—the pressure to churn out work and hit financial targets within systems and processes that aren’t built around customer service and completely outside of their control leads to stress, anxiety, and burnout.

Lawyers are expected to do more with less: write-offs and financial targets go up, so lawyers have to work harder and longer hours. And unlike AI, humans can’t work 24/7 without concentration fraying and health deteriorating very quickly.

And when mistakes are inevitably made, clients complain. And rightly so. They didn’t pay for poor outcomes, communication, and service, but that’s what they feel they get.

And it’s not the law firm that bears the brunt of it; it’s the lawyer. Is it any wonder we see stories of lawyers covering up mistakes, only to be found out down the line and struck off? No lawyer sets out to mislead clients and employers; it’s the circumstances they find themselves in. And no matter how often these stories come up, the systemic challenges never improve. We play these situations like they are outliers, but they aren’t, and we need to address them as a profession.

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So what can we do?

There are many things we can do to improve this situation, but I want to focus on just a few here:

We have to look at why lawyers cover up mistakes—explore whether those are rare cases, or are they just the cases that are uncovered? We have to ask why there are an increasing number of younger lawyers leaving the profession and whether it is the environment we are creating for them.

We have to stop paying lip service to mental health and actually put it high on the agenda of every law firm. Happier lawyers, in environments that help them thrive, are more productive lawyers who produce better outcomes for clients, more revenue for firms, and want to stay in the profession.

We need to invest in technology. Right now, all the talk is about AI products that speed up drafting and research, but none of these on their own improve customer service. Doing what we’ve always done, in a world that is moving so quickly and demanding so much more, won’t get us what we’ve always got. It’s leading to what we are reading in these Gazette stories. The situation won’t improve because we buy a tech product that speeds up our drafting. We have to look at the customer’s buying journey and experience and understand that they don’t actually value the contract—the contract is the by-product of everything else they come to a lawyer for: the lawyer’s knowledge and experience; the service; the outcome; the peace of mind. We have to build legal businesses around the customer experience.

And we have to charge more for what we do. The narrative that lawyers get paid too much is ridiculous. It comes from watching shows like Suits that damage the perception of lawyers. In any transaction involving multiple advisors, the lawyer always gets paid the least. In a real estate deal, the agent gets paid more. An M&A deal? Look at what the investment banker gets paid compared to the lawyer.

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I’m not suggesting that the real estate agent or investment banker don’t deserve it—they do. Why? Because they’ve articulated their value to clients and persuaded them that their price represents good value for what the client gets. Lawyers are horrendous at this and we need to improve how we explain our value to clients.

(You can learn how to articulate your value in my digital education course, The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®, which you can buy now.)

The legal profession has to get out of this race-to-the-bottom trap we have fallen into. Lower margins, higher write-offs, increased billable hours—they’re damaging our reputation and harming the next generation of potential leaders.

Charging more enables law firms to invest more and to give clients the service and experience they are looking for. The vast majority of clients aren’t price conscious; they are value conscious. They want good service and they are happy to pay for it.

So let’s give them what they want, and create a legal profession fit for the 21st century.

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The news report in the Financial Times that KPMG had asked its auditor to pass on efficiency savings from its use of AI onto KPMG is both interesting and worrying.

It’s interesting because big firms like KPMG do a lot with fixed fees and value pricing, and focus on value to maintain pricing levels, yet seem to be suggesting that AI is just an efficiency tool that cuts costs which should be passed on to clients.

The truth is, AI offers so much more than just efficiencies, though that does seem to be the conversation that pervades the legal profession. And this is the problem. Once again, the legal profession presents progress through the lens of efficiency, and if efficiency is all the legal profession can offer clients, then it will result in lower fee income. So AI, like so much other technology, becomes less an investment and more a double hit on income—both the expense of the technology and the hit on the resulting revenue.

This won’t just lead to a race to the bottom, it will lead to a huge reduction in lawyers at firms. This is where the narrative of “AI will take our jobs” comes from, and is both destructive and simply not true.

Now, we’re making certain assumptions about the KPMG situation. They are one of the ‘Big 4’, which means they are a sophisticated buyer and have considerable power to negotiate. So this could be a negotiating tactic—“show me why we shouldn’t pay a lower price.”

That’s perfectly reasonable. If the auditor can’t come up with any value added to their clients with the use of AI, then KPMG will be entitled to ask for savings.

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This story reminds me of the headlines a few years ago when Amazon increased the price of Prime. In the UK, Amazon released a statement saying the price increase was due to costs going up. Customers weren’t happy—Amazon is big enough to absorb those costs, why should customers have to pay for them?

In the US, the story was very different: Amazon told customers that the price increase was to allow them to invest in new shows like The Lord of the Rings and Reacher. The first season of The Rings of Power alone was reported to cost somewhere between $465 million and and $700 million; and fans of the Jack Reacher books were clamouring for an adaption that reflected the character better than many felt the two Tom Cruise movies had.

The key to the responses customers had was value: Amazon UK presented the price increase in terms of their own costs, while Amazon US presented it as an investment for the benefit of clients.

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So there is an opportunity. AI presents a huge opportunity to improve both service and client relationships. To make the most of this opportunity, law firms have to do a much better job of articulating the value that AI provides.

AI is a difference-maker on so many levels. Speed of output alongside quality is a better outcome for clients, and that is what clients want. If we can give clients faster outcomes, which is all part of a premium service, clients are happy to pay for this. But this requires a completely different way of talking about what it is that we do and how we offer that service.

Herein lies the problem: In a profession that, for the last 70 years, has only talked in terms of effort and hourly rates, lawyers don’t know how to articulate their true value.

One of my biggest bugbears is when I hear a lawyer say, “Don’t forget, your value is in your time.” A lawyer’s value has never been time—it is their knowledge, experience, critical thinking; it is in the outcomes that only lawyers can give to the clients; it is in the service levels that we provide; the peace of mind; the risk we bear on their behalf. None of that is dependent on how much time we spend on their matter.

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You can create huge value for a client in one hour and zero value in five hours. How do you make the argument that your value is in your time?

The legal profession needs to do 3 things very quickly:

First, law firms need to invest time and resources into understanding what AI can really do for their business. No more ‘innovation theatre’, as Uwais Iqbal calls it, but a real analysis of where AI can be most effective across the entire business, not just in document drafting and research. They need to understand how it will impact revenue and profit and look at whether they need to move away from the billable hour now, while they can control the narrative, and before it is forced on them.

Secondly, law firms need to make the investment in the technology. Client and intermediary complaints about the pace at which lawyers move may sometimes be unfair, but it is not wholly without merit. Lawyers take on too much work for too low fees and that needs to change. AI can help with that, but lawyers need to stop seeing technology as a cost of doing business and start seeing it for what it is: a tool to help vastly improve customer service. Change to the underlying system we work in may be slow and out of our control, but we can all improve our own internal systems and processes to give customers a better experience.

If law firms can do these first two effectively, the third becomes much simpler.

We need to shift the conversation away from our efforts and inputs to our outputs and outcomes. This conversation has been neglected for decades. Lawyers create transformations for clients. I can’t say this enough: lawyers create transformations for clients.

We don’t talk in those terms, but we have to. Because if we don’t, we can’t expect clients to just know it, or to compensate us fairly for those transformations.

This is one of the first things we do when I work with lawyers and law firms: we work together on articulating their value proposition—not only in 30-second elevator pitches, but throughout entire conversations with clients and prospects. And it transforms my clients’ thinking: it reminds them of all the great things they do for their own clients. It also helps them become much more robust with their pricing. Why shouldn’t they get paid well for transforming a client’s life?

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We focus on pricing fairly—making sure the value they receive for the work they do is equal to the value the client receives for the outcome they get.

This is a career-long process of fine-tuning—you never get it perfect, but you are always so much happier than you were under the billable hour.

But to do this, you have to be able to articulate value, not effort. Because AI is going to destroy the effort argument that lawyers have relied on for nearly three-quarters of a century.

What’s left behind is entirely up to you.

The industry is currently experiencing a sharp divergence. While some firms continue to achieve double-digit growth, others are witnessing a realisation dip that mirrors the 2008–2009 financial crisis. This widening gap signals a deep structural divide. The era of relying on instinct and reactive reporting is over; we are entering an age where precision is the only architect of survival. As one law-firm CFO aptly stated: “We can’t afford to look efficient; we have to be efficient.”

Takeaway 1: The Write-Off Apocalypse and the Rate Hike Ceiling

The disconnect between rising rates and realised revenue has moved from a friction point to a full-scale crisis. While firms are charging more on paper, they are collecting less in practice. This “doom loop” is not merely a mathematical error; it’s a behavioural failure rooted in a well-documented cultural hesitancy among lawyers to escalate billing conversations. If ever there was proof that lawyers struggle to articulate value, this is it.

The data in BigHand’s report confirms a widening gap between projected profitability and banked margin:

• 96% of firms increased standard hourly rates in the last 12 months.

• 89% of firms reported increased write-offs, with 88% expecting further rises in 2026.

• 90% of firms saw an increase in overall client discounts and write-downs.

• 90% of firms also reported that overall debtors had increased, with 87% expecting a further increase in 2026.

And it doesn’t stop there because today’s reality is worse than firms had expected. In 2025, BigHand reported that only 49% of firms expected write-offs to rise, 70% anticipated increased discounting, and 72% higher numbers of debtors; every metric of financial performance, worse than predicted.

Pricing alone is no longer a large enough lever to guarantee profit. When firms raise rates without a corresponding proof of value or the commercial courage to defend those rates, realisation slips. In 2026, clients will no longer accept rate inflation without quantifiable efficiency and value.

Takeaway 2: Cash Flow is the New Profitability

There is a real shift in priority among law firm leaders, moving from headline profit figures to liquidity and cash-flow predictability. For the modern legal business, the speed at which revenue converts to cash is now a more critical health indicator than the total revenue figure itself.

The primary driver of this pressure is the explosion of aged Work In Progress:

• 50% of firms now identify aged WIP as the primary driver of cash-flow pressure—quite the jump from 32% just one year ago.

• 90% of firms report that WIP is increasing year-on-year.

• 26% of finance leaders now rank cash-flow predictability as their top concern, surpassing even headline profitability.

The reality of 2026 is far harsher than the projections of 2025. Lock-up deterioration is becoming the defining liquidity challenge for the sector. Firms that fail to address the operational engine that converts work into cash are essentially sitting on profit-at-risk.

Takeaway 3: The AI Productivity Paradox

If you’ve followed my work, you’ll know I hate the billable hour, so anything that challenges the model and leads to its demise is, for me, an opportunity at a new dawn for the legal profession.

AI is that opportunity. Its growing use and adoption among law firms is creating a strategic crisis for the billable hour. While technology is undeniably boosting output, that efficiency is causing margin leakage because firms lack the ‘value narrative’ required to decouple their fees from time-based inputs.

The paradox is defined by a sharp misalignment between efficiency and economics:

• AI has increased matter output by 34% and task speed by 29%.

• Simultaneously, firms have seen a 29% reduction in billable hours per matter.

• While 47% of firms report rising requests for Alternative Fee Arrangements (AFAs), the confidence to execute them remains limited because firms lack the real-time data to model risk and value.

The problem goes further than lack of data. This is a problem of articulation. Lawyers aren’t taught how to articulate the value they bring to clients and deals. From their first day of law school right through to practice, they are told repeatedly that their value is in their time.’ Not in their years of experience or ability to provide outcomes no other advisors can, but their time. AI undercuts all of this and leaves lawyers floundering as time completing matters goes down. As it will continue to.

No amount of data will solve this. If lawyers tell clients they are paying for time, then clients will rightly want lower bills as time goes down.

Those lawyers who can shift the conversation away from time and onto value will not only hold their prices in many cases, but actually increase them where it makes sense.

With all this tension taking place, firms are asking lawyers to bill more hours while simultaneously adopting technology that allows them to complete work in fewer hours, for clients who expect the price to go down when time goes down.

• 74% of firms say the billable hour or hitting billable targets is still the primary KPI for lawyers.

• Yet 64% report a decrease in billable hours over the last year.

• 99% of firms have increased billable-hour targets and plan to increase them again.

AI does not inherently erode margin; a combination of lack of a data-backed and failure to articulate value does. AI is a pricing and narrative opportunity, not just a productivity gain. The firms that thrive will be those that move beyond task-level productivity to prove how technology creates better outcomes, rather than just faster ones.

Takeaway 4: From Billable Resource to Owner of Profit

To bridge the gap between efficiency and profitability, firms have to undergo a cultural evolution. Partners can no longer be viewed solely as billable resources; they must become ‘owners of profit’ who understand the commercial lifecycle of their matters. Commercial acumen has never been more important, and this shift is the only viable solution to the AI productivity paradox.

However, a significant disconnect remains between firm expectations and institutional support:

• Only 33% of firms provide associates with structured training in financial performance or profitability management.

• Firms are beginning to realign KPIs to reflect this new reality: 17% now track “profitability contribution,” while 15% prioritise “client satisfaction scores” and 13% reward the “innovation and use of legal tech.”

• 46% of firms have already introduced incentives or penalties tied to write-down reductions.

The mandate is clear: commercial fluency must become a core competency. Value is not a retrospective measurement—it is a management discipline that must be addressed mid-matter.

Takeaway 5: Business development holds the key

It has always been the way that law firms rely heavily on a few key rainmakers, a small number of major client relationships or key practice areas. From the outside, this has always looked like it works: revenue appears strong, relationships deep, and panel positions secure. But client concentration/overdependence is now one of the key strategic risks (26%) in law-firm financial performance. And stories like the demise of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, brought about by just a small number of rainmakers being picked off, aren’t as rare as you think.

Cross-selling is the best way to protect revenue and cash stability. It is also a firm’s lowest-hanging fruit with the easiest wins. However, despite recognition of its importance, on average, only one-third of firms have implemented, or plan to implement, cross-practice collaboration practices or incentives.

• 31% prioritise joint client targeting across practice areas

• 33% share client or matter profitability data between practices

• 33% have coordinated pricing for multi-practice engagements

• 34% have partner incentives for cross-practice collaboration

The fact is that opportunities exist, but firms don’t make the most of them, with training and coordination poor.

Firms can’t continue to rely on past relationships to drive growth. They need a greater number of rainmakers across all practice areas, who understand their clients deeply and broadly within relevant industries and sectors. This is strategic, it comes from the top-down, and it requires ongoing training and collaboration.

What does all of this mean?

Profitability can no longer be treated as a number that appears at year end if everyone has worked hard enough. It is created—or destroyed—much earlier than that. It lives in how work is sold, how it is scoped, how it is priced, how it is managed mid-matter, and how confidently lawyers can explain value while the work is still in motion.

For years, firms have relied on rate rises, goodwill, and heroic individual effort to paper over structural cracks. That approach has run out of road. Data now shows us, in real time, where margin is leaking. AI is exposing how fragile time-based thinking really is. Clients are pushing back harder, not because they don’t value legal advice, but because firms haven’t kept pace with how value needs to be explained and priced.

In 2026, profitability is not something to be chased. It is something to be designed.

That design choice shows up in four places:

• whether data is used to steer decisions, not just report on them

• whether business development is treated as a core commercial skill, not an optional extra

• whether pricing reflects outcomes and risk, not internal effort

• whether partners are accountable for profit, not just production

Firms that treat profitability as a by-product of busyness will continue to see rising rates collide with falling realisation. Firms that treat it as a system — deliberate, connected, and actively managed — will build businesses that can absorb change rather than react to it.

The inflection point isn’t coming. It’s already here. The only open question is whether law firm leaders choose to redesign the system now, or wait for the numbers to force the issue later.

It’s the quality of the conversations they have with you.

Don’t believe me?

Think about the last time a client wrote a review of your work. Did it say:

‘They draft a document better than anyone I’ve ever known’?

No, it didn’t.

What it did say was something along the lines of:

‘They kept us informed throughout the process’ or

‘They always make time to explain what’s going on’ or

‘Their advice was fundamental in how we moved forward’.

If you want to create powerful relationships with clients, all of your conversations need to add value to THEM, not you.

Why?

Because if your conversations are helping your clients achieve their goals, they will be more likely to come to you for help.

But here’s where your problem lies:

You want every client meeting to end in work.

Of course you do. Otherwise, what’s the point?

So without realising it, you are putting your intentions in direct competition with your clients’. Their focus is on better results and yours is on winning work.

This means you don’t spend your time with them adding value, or helping them reach better outcomes.

Every single conversation you have with a client should add value. This is especially important during your early conversations.

Because you may not be the only lawyer they are talking to.

And if you’re not giving them something to think about each time they speak with you, another lawyer might be. And that lawyer could end up stealing your client.

Clients know they have more choice than ever, so they aren’t looking for document drafters. They want lawyers who will advise them and get them better outcomes than your competitors.

What’s more, if you’re midway through a transaction, your clients are paying for those meetings. And they aren’t paying for your time. They are paying for your knowledge and experience. So they don’t want you to keep it all to yourself. They expect you to use it to their advantage.

Make your conversations about them. Ask the questions that enable you to provide the advice that leaves clients wanting more meetings with you.

Help them make the best decisions.

Because that’s ultimately what clients want.

So stop thinking about how you can bring the conversation round to what you do.

And start asking questions that get to the bottom of what your clients want to achieve.

Get started—download The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® now

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All those lawyer conversations I’ve posted about over the years.

All in one place.

You’ll laugh.

You’ll cry.

You’ll despair.

You’ll feel great that you’ve never said some of this… or have you?

Here it is, for your reading pleasure - just click this link.

The Downfall of the Billable Hour

1. There’s No Cost Certainty

The billable hour is notorious for its lack of cost certainty. Clients often find themselves facing unexpected, inflated bills that leave them feeling frustrated and suspicious. The uncertainty surrounding legal costs often stops clients from seeking legal assistance, causing them to delay or abandon important legal matters.

2. It Incentivises Inefficiency

Under the billable hour, lawyers are rewarded for their time, not their effectiveness. This creates a strange incentive structure where lawyers may be inclined to drag out tasks or do unnecessary work in order to increase their billable hours. This not only adds costs for clients, but also undermines the legal profession's commitment to providing efficient and effective legal services.

3. Interests Aren’t Aligned

The billable hour creates a misalignment of interests between lawyers and clients. Lawyers are driven by maximising their billable hours, while clients want a quick and value-driven resolution to their legal matters. This misalignment can lead to conflicts of interest, eating away at the trust and collaboration necessary for a successful lawyer-client relationship.

4. It Impedes Client Communication

By billing clients for every 6 minutes spent on a matter, the billable hour discourages open and frequent communication between lawyers and clients. Clients may hesitate to reach out to their lawyers for fear of incurring additional charges, which can delay the exchange of vital information and potentially harm the client's legal position.

And then we come to AI…

One of the most significant factors that I believe will lead to the end of the billable hour is the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) in the legal profession. AI has the potential to revolutionise legal research, document drafting, and other repetitive tasks that traditionally take up a significant amount of lawyers' time.

AI-powered tools can quickly analyse vast amounts of legal information, identify relevant precedents, and generate draft documents with incredible speed and accuracy. This automation significantly reduces the time and effort required for tasks that were previously billed by the hour. As AI continues to evolve, its capabilities will continue to expand, leading to even greater efficiencies.

As AI increasingly takes on more responsibilities, it not only speeds up the completion of legal tasks, but also reduces costs for both lawyers and clients. AI-driven efficiency enables lawyers to deliver quality work in a fraction of the time previously required, eliminating the need to bill clients for the often large number of hours spent on research or drafting.

AI disrupts the traditional billable hour model by challenging the notion that the value of legal services is solely tied to the time spent on a task. With AI handling routine and time-consuming tasks, lawyers can redirect their focus towards higher-level strategising and providing bespoke legal advice. This shift away from time-based billing is a natural progression.

The disruptive force of AI in the legal profession challenges the foundations of the billable hour system. It requires a fundamental overhaul of how legal services are valued and priced. With the growth of AI, lawyers and law firms have an opportunity to redefine their pricing structures and move towards pricing models that better reflect the value provided to clients, rather than simply the time spent.

Embracing Fixed, Upfront Pricing

1. Cost Transparency and Predictability

Fixed, upfront pricing brings a complete change to the legal profession by offering cost transparency and predictability. Clients know the exact amount they will pay for legal services from the outset, eliminating the anxiety associated with unexpected bills. With transparency comes trust, which encourages clients to seek legal assistance early. And as advisors, we want our clients to get out in front of issues, rather than having to solve them.

2. It Encourages A Focus On Value

Unlike the billable hour, upfront pricing incentivises lawyers to focus on efficiency, effectiveness and value. Lawyers are motivated to complete tasks quickly and effectively, as their fee is not tied to the amount of time spent. Law firms look for innovative ways to streamline processes and deliver high-quality legal services, while being able to reevaluate costs for clients.

3. Enhanced Client Satisfaction

One of the biggest causes of complaints by clients is unexpected bills, including final invoices that go way over estimates. Upfront pricing eliminates this complaint, and puts the focus squarely on meeting client needs and expectations. By offering clear pricing structures, lawyers can better align their services with client objectives and ensure their satisfaction. Clients can make informed decisions about engaging with their lawyers without the fear of escalating costs, which creates a more positive overall experience.

4. Stronger Firm Differentiation

The billable hour is still the predominant business model in the legal profession, so adopting upfront pricing can provide legal businesses with a competitive advantage in the market. By breaking away from the hourly rate model, firms can differentiate themselves as innovative, client-focused legal advisors. With it comes attracting new clients, retaining existing ones, and positioning the firm as a leader in the evolving legal landscape.

The disadvantages of the billable hour highlight the urgent need for change. Meanwhile, the benefits of upfront pricing paint a compelling picture of a future where legal services are accessible, efficient, and focused on delivering exceptional client experiences.

AI, which streamlines legal research and drafting, poses a significant and existential challenge to the billable hour. As AI continues to advance, it will trigger the transition towards upfront pricing models that emphasise value, efficiency, effectiveness, and client satisfaction.

This is a paradigm shift, and it is crucial for lawyers and law firms to recognise the benefits of upfront pricing. After all, it is a model that clients recognise and are comfortable with because it’s how they purchase everything else in life.

The billable hour may be the standard in the legal profession, but its flaws are there for everyone to see. Fixed, upfront pricing offers a model that empowers lawyers, law firms, and clients alike. By moving to upfront pricing, the legal profession can address the shortcomings of the billable hour system and create a more transparent, efficient, effective, and client-centric approach to delivering legal services, returning lawyers to a status that has almost been lost: the trusted advisor.

Get started—download The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® now

Unlock your rainmaking potential

BD Breakthrough Blueprint®

My digital education course gives you the tools you'll need to become a 21st century rainmaker and trusted advisor.

Here's what The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® can help you achieve:

• Win more work from better clients;

• Become a more confident rainmaker;

• Develop a focused BD mindset;

• Build a larger pipeline of prospective clients;

• Change the narrative with referrers and intermediaries;

• Organic business growth as the foundation for the future;

• Fast-track your career to partnership or owning your own legal business;

And so much more.

All this for only £495

Or pay 5 x £100 over 5 months.

And it starts with you clicking the link and buying your copy:

https://www.legalbalanceinstitute.com

.

Start this exciting journey now and become the rainmaker you've always wanted to be.

Fancy a free e-book about lawyers?

Get your free copy of 'Bullsh*t & Bollo*ks Excuses' now

All those lawyer conversations I’ve posted about over the years.

All in one place.

You’ll laugh.

You’ll cry.

You’ll despair.

You’ll feel great that you’ve never said some of this… or have you?

Here it is, for your reading pleasure - just click this link.

Having practised law for a number of years, I saw, and continue to see, first hand the damage it does from top to bottom in a law firm.

I could write about the waste it creates - that write-offs in the profession average around 15-20% each year.

Or the stress and poor mental health caused by the unrealistic expectations set trying to reach 1,700+ chargeable hours each year, all the while trying to build and maintain client relationships, undertaking essential non-chargeable work. And remembering to eat to live.

Or the impact on home life - studies have revealed that around 25% of married lawyers end up getting divorced.

Or that those unrealistic expectations lead almost universally to inflating chargeable time on matters, in the knowledge that you can later write off, well, 15-20% of that time anyway. An anonymous poll in Roll on Friday in 2024 revealed that 35% of lawyers have padded their timesheets, with 13% admitting to doing it regularly.

Chargeable time disproportionately impacts mothers returning to work after maternity leave, many of whom will be working reduced hours, so producing fewer chargeable hours and therefore not keeping up with their male counterparts when it comes to yearly reviews and promotions.

And it’s not just the impact it has on lawyers and the way they work. Think about it from a strategic level. If you are a partner or director of a law firm, one of your responsibilities is to ensure that your teams are meeting their chargeable hours each month and year; to trawl through endless amounts of data to find out who isn’t keeping up and who’s writing off too much time; then have meetings with team leaders to berate them and pass down the message that chargeable time is what keeps the lights on.

Was that your dream when you made it to the top of the tree? Was that the impact you were hoping to make?

Now, these problems would be more than enough on their own. But, in addition to these, it’s also stopping you and your colleagues from cross-selling - a key component in growing your business.

Selling to an existing client is 6-7 times cheaper than acquiring a new one, and the success rate of selling to an existing client is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new client is only 5-20%!

These stats lay bare the importance of cross-selling to law firms. Why put most of your effort into hunting for new clients when your easiest wins are already in your database - clients who know you and have worked with you before?

And if, deep down, we know (which most of us do), why don’t we cross-sell more?

The answer is very simple: chargeable time. Lawyers are expected to bill between 1,400 and 2,000+ chargeable hours each year and that is the metric by which they are judged, rewarded or penalised.

If that’s the case, why would you spend any of your precious non-chargeable BD time winning work for someone else? If it’s not taken into account at your yearly review, you’re not going to help a colleague reach their chargeable hours target at your own expense.

“So, you’ve not hit your chargeable hours target for this year.”

“Yes, but I brought in 3 new clients: two for Corporate and 1 for the Retail sector that has produced work the Employment and Commercial teams - those fees combined have reached over £300,000. Add that to my own chargeable work and I’m way over my target.”

“I can see that, but you haven’t hit your chargeable hours, which has impacted our team’s figures.”

That is a conversation that happens time and time again: yes, you’ve brought in new clients, but they’ve boosted another team’s figures, while ours haven’t reached their target.

Overall, the law firm benefits from cross-selling, but the individual practice areas don’t, which means firms live within silos - each practice area focused solely on bringing in work for themselves.

Which creates the biggest problem of all: poor client service. You have a client who would benefit greatly from working with your firm across different practice areas, but you don’t take the time to get to know them beyond the work they come to you for, so they have to search for other law firms to do the rest of the work.

Imagine how the client would feel if they found out you could have saved them time and expense by putting them in touch with one of your colleagues? And imagine how you’d feel if you found out that a client who works with another practice area was involved in a transaction and used a different firm because they had no idea you existed?

And you run the risk of losing that client altogether. There are lawyers out there who cross-sell, who make sure their clients don’t need to look elsewhere for legal advice. And when they come to your client and find out that they can support all their legal needs, that client will make the move over to your competitor.

So why is chargeable time still so dominant in the legal profession? Why do we continue to use it when there are better alternatives? Well, that’s an article for another time.

For now, know this: If you build a culture of cross-selling throughout your firm, then every lawyer benefits from work being passed around the entire firm, which means the firm benefits from increased fees.

And most importantly, your clients benefit from better service provided by lawyers who care about all their legal needs, not just their own chargeable hours targets. And those clients will see you as a trusted advisor - that strategic partner they know they can turn to help them get better outcomes.

Whether chargeable time is the cause or just a symptom of a bigger problem is up for debate, but what can’t be denied is that clients lose out because of it.

And it’s up to the legal profession to do something about it.

Get started—download The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® now

Unlock your rainmaking potential

BD Breakthrough Blueprint®

My digital education course gives you the tools you'll need to become a 21st century rainmaker and trusted advisor.

Here's what The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® can help you achieve:

• Win more work from better clients;

• Become a more confident rainmaker;

• Develop a focused BD mindset;

• Build a larger pipeline of prospective clients;

• Change the narrative with referrers and intermediaries;

• Organic business growth as the foundation for the future;

• Fast-track your career to partnership or owning your own legal business;

And so much more.

All this for only £495

Or pay 5 x £100 over 5 months.

And it starts with you clicking the link and buying your copy:

https://www.legalbalanceinstitute.com

.

Start this exciting journey now and become the rainmaker you've always wanted to be.

Fancy a free e-book about lawyers?

Get your free copy of 'Bullsh*t & Bollo*ks Excuses' now

All those lawyer conversations I’ve posted about over the years.

All in one place.

You’ll laugh.

You’ll cry.

You’ll despair.

You’ll feel great that you’ve never said some of this… or have you?

Here it is, for your reading pleasure - just click this link.

We confidently go in with our price and get the standard response: “Ooh, that’s a bit steep, can you go lower?”

Now, there are two reasons why your client or prospect will be asking that question:

1. They have got a quote from a competitor; or

2. They’ve worked with you before and they know this is the dance they go through with you before you come down to a figure they are happy with.

If there’s a competitor waiting in the wings, it can be tempting to drop your price in order to keep the client, especially as we know there are law firms out there that will do the work for ridiculous prices where it’s actually impossible to do the work with any level of service included.

Here’s the problem: drop your price once and your client will be asking for a discount forever, which then leaves you with only two options: one, at the next negotiation, start really high in the hope that the client doesn’t run screaming without bothering to ask you to drop the price; or two, accept that this will be a client who will squeeze your margins from now on.

But here’s the most important factor: this client sees you as a commodity, so feels no loyalty towards you. They don’t value the work you do, so the moment a competitor comes along with a price you can’t beat, that client is gone.

There’s only one way to solve your commodity-discount problem: you need to move your conversations away from price and offer a complete service that makes you a trusted advisor. That doesn’t mean you have to be a full-service law firm - it means that, where you or your colleagues can’t do the work, you use your network of contacts to find someone who can.

And most importantly, you have to understand your client and their needs so well that the advice you give them is personalised and the client sees you as an important part of their team, values the work you do for them and - here it comes - pays you what you tell them your advice is worth.

That means you have to know and be able to articulate your own value, particularly how it relates to each individual client and their circumstances. That takes patience, research and time with your clients, but ask yourself this: if you aren’t taking the time to understand your client, why should they take the time to understand your fees?

Think about how you add value to matters - it is so much more than drafting the documents. What you’ll realise is that explaining this to clients only takes a few minutes, but makes a big difference.

You also have to know the value of the transaction to the client - not just what success looks like, but failure too. If they are cost-conscious, imagine the cost of not using you? What will happen when they put price before value once too often?

If you’ve done your job during your initial conversation with the client, you’ll have separated your offering from your competitors’ - they’ll understand the value you bring to them and their matter.

This is really important: it’s not anyone else’s job to educate your client, to explain why what you do helps avoid some kind of pain, overcome a challenge or build towards a strategic gain - it’s yours.

Understanding and articulating your value - and becoming a trusted advisor - is the best way out of the price negotiation hole.

Will this work for every client? No, but it will work much better than being beaten down on price.

Get started—download The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® now

Unlock your rainmaking potential

BD Breakthrough Blueprint®

My digital education course gives you the tools you'll need to become a 21st century rainmaker and trusted advisor.

Here's what The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® can help you achieve:

• Win more work from better clients;

• Become a more confident rainmaker;

• Develop a focused BD mindset;

• Build a larger pipeline of prospective clients;

• Change the narrative with referrers and intermediaries;

• Organic business growth as the foundation for the future;

• Fast-track your career to partnership or owning your own legal business;

And so much more.

All this for only £495

Or pay 5 x £100 over 5 months.

And it starts with you clicking the link and buying your copy:

https://www.legalbalanceinstitute.com

.

Start this exciting journey now and become the rainmaker you've always wanted to be.

Fancy a free e-book about lawyers?

Get your free copy of 'Bullsh*t & Bollo*ks Excuses' now

All those lawyer conversations I’ve posted about over the years.

All in one place.

You’ll laugh.

You’ll cry.

You’ll despair.

You’ll feel great that you’ve never said some of this… or have you?

Here it is, for your reading pleasure - just click this link.

You’re in your scoping conversation with a client and they tell you what they are doing that requires your legal knowledge and experience.

You ask questions and they give you more information.

Before you go on to give your advice, you ask one more question - the most vital of all:

“Is there anything else I need to know?”

This question is so important because it sweeps up any outstanding information that you may not have teased out or may have forgotten to ask.

It also gives the client an opportunity to think through anything else they need to tell you:

“Yes, there’s a really short time frame on this”

“We’re working with our IT team on this, so you’ll need to speak with them too”

“We’re going to need a bridging loan for about 6 weeks”

All of this is really important information, but sometimes, in the rush to give instructions, clients can forget to tell us things.

This question, and variations like “Is there anything else that is important to you

Get started—download The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® now

Unlock your rainmaking potential

BD Breakthrough Blueprint®

My digital education course gives you the tools you'll need to become a 21st century rainmaker and trusted advisor.

Here's what The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® can help you achieve:

• Win more work from better clients;

• Become a more confident rainmaker;

• Develop a focused BD mindset;

• Build a larger pipeline of prospective clients;

• Change the narrative with referrers and intermediaries;

• Organic business growth as the foundation for the future;

• Fast-track your career to partnership or owning your own legal business;

And so much more.

All this for only £495

Or pay 5 x £100 over 5 months.

And it starts with you clicking the link and buying your copy:

https://www.legalbalanceinstitute.com

.

Start this exciting journey now and become the rainmaker you've always wanted to be.

Fancy a free e-book about lawyers?

Get your free copy of 'Bullsh*t & Bollo*ks Excuses' now

All those lawyer conversations I’ve posted about over the years.

All in one place.

You’ll laugh.

You’ll cry.

You’ll despair.

You’ll feel great that you’ve never said some of this… or have you?

Here it is, for your reading pleasure - just click this link.

The truth is, no business ever does.

No matter how good our offering or pitch are, sometimes it just isn’t enough to bring that client on board.

That can be hard to take, especially when we believe 100% in what we do and how we can help.

The most painful ones are when a client comes to us, rather than us reaching out to them. Why would they go through the process if they didn’t want to use us?

We know some prospects are just shopping around, but there are some who reach out specifically for our offering.

There’s that famous saying:

‘You don’t succeed or fail, you succeed or learn’.

It’s a really important saying to live by.

Nothing in this world goes perfectly at the first attempt.

But those of us who persist, who test and learn, adapt our approach, get the best results.

The key to learning is feedback: if a client or prospect decides to use another law firm’s services, don’t be afraid to find out why.

That information is gold to you - each situation is an opportunity to improve your approach and get a better outcome in the future.

But you can’t learn if you don’t ask.

So make sure to get the answers you need.

That’s it for now.

Here’s to making it rain,

Scott

Get started—download The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® now

Unlock your rainmaking potential

BD Breakthrough Blueprint®

My digital education course gives you the tools you'll need to become a 21st century rainmaker and trusted advisor.

Here's what The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® can help you achieve:

• Win more work from better clients;

• Become a more confident rainmaker;

• Develop a focused BD mindset;

• Build a larger pipeline of prospective clients;

• Change the narrative with referrers and intermediaries;

• Organic business growth as the foundation for the future;

• Fast-track your career to partnership or owning your own legal business;

And so much more.

All this for only £495

Or pay 5 x £100 over 5 months.

And it starts with you clicking the link and buying your copy:

https://www.legalbalanceinstitute.com

.

Start this exciting journey now and become the rainmaker you've always wanted to be.

Fancy a free e-book about lawyers?

Get your free copy of 'Bullsh*t & Bollo*ks Excuses' now

All those lawyer conversations I’ve posted about over the years.

All in one place.

You’ll laugh.

You’ll cry.

You’ll despair.

You’ll feel great that you’ve never said some of this… or have you?

Here it is, for your reading pleasure - just click this link.

But what if I told you that there's a transformative way to elevate these connections beyond the transactional?

Enter the art of creating connections between clients and contacts – a strategic move that not only benefits both parties, but also positions you as a trusted advisor who fosters deep and meaningful relationships.

Building Bridges, Building Trust

At Legal Balance, we believe in the power of connection – the kind that transcends the traditional client-lawyer dynamics. By actively looking for opportunities to connect clients with relevant contacts and vice versa, we're not just facilitating transactions; we're building bridges of trust and mutual benefit.

And you should be doing this too. The best part is, it’s really simple to do.

The Power of Listening and Understanding

Central to this approach is the art of asking questions and actively listening to the needs and desires of both clients and connections. By understanding their goals, aspirations, and challenges, you're able to identify synergies and create connections that add genuine value to their lives and businesses.

Leveraging CRM for Relationship Building

Here's where your CRM system becomes your most potent ally. Within this digital goldmine, you can shape and nurture relationships, weaving a web of connections that knows no geographical boundaries or industry silos. Every interaction, every touchpoint, is carefully documented, ensuring that no opportunity for connection goes unnoticed.

Events as Catalysts for Connection

But your efforts shouldn't stop there. Seize every opportunity to bring your connections together – be it a networking event, a panel discussion, or a client appreciation party. These events serve as openings to strengthen new connections, spark collaborations, and solidify existing relationships.

Becoming Relationship Architects

You're not just a lawyer; you're a relationship architect – building networks of connections that enrich the lives and businesses of everyone involved. As you build bridges, foster trust, and add value, you're reshaping the landscape of legal relationships, one connection at a time.

Get started—download The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® now

Unlock your rainmaking potential

BD Breakthrough Blueprint®

My digital education course gives you the tools you'll need to become a 21st century rainmaker and trusted advisor.

Here's what The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® can help you achieve:

• Win more work from better clients;

• Become a more confident rainmaker;

• Develop a focused BD mindset;

• Build a larger pipeline of prospective clients;

• Change the narrative with referrers and intermediaries;

• Organic business growth as the foundation for the future;

• Fast-track your career to partnership or owning your own legal business;

And so much more.

All this for only £495

Or pay 5 x £100 over 5 months.

And it starts with you clicking the link and buying your copy:

https://www.legalbalanceinstitute.com

.

Start this exciting journey now and become the rainmaker you've always wanted to be.

Fancy a free e-book about lawyers?

Get your free copy of 'Bullsh*t & Bollo*ks Excuses' now

All those lawyer conversations I’ve posted about over the years.

All in one place.

You’ll laugh.

You’ll cry.

You’ll despair.

You’ll feel great that you’ve never said some of this… or have you?

Here it is, for your reading pleasure - just click this link.

Hearing this can feel like an attack on your pricing and, by extension, your value. But in reality, this objection is an opportunity to uncover what your prospect really cares about and steer the conversation toward outcomes that matter to them.

When a prospect mentions a lower-priced competitor, it usually comes down to one of two reasons:

1. You haven’t effectively communicated the value you bring to the table; or

2. They’re price sensitive and looking for the cheapest option.

How do you respond? Here’s the approach you should take:

The Response That Filters the Right Clients

“Thanks for sharing that. I understand you might want to shop around. There are usually two reasons someone might speak to another firm:

1. I haven’t clearly communicated the value we provide that reflects our pricing - that’s on me;

Or

2. Price is your main priority.

If it’s the first, I’m happy to walk you through the unique value we bring and how it benefits you. But if it’s the second, we might not be the best fit, and that’s okay—I wouldn’t want to waste your time if cost is your primary concern.

What do you think fits your situation best?”

Why This Works

Bold, isn’t it? Some might even say arrogant. But here’s what lawyers overlook: most people don't have the time to call around for quotes. That's something that we’ve convinced ourselves is a truth, and it has caused us to lower our prices and fall into a race to the bottom.

Most people want to have one conversation with a lawyer who can give them the confidence and peace of mind to go ahead.

If they've felt the need to phone another law firm, it's because you didn't fill the conversation with enough value and show them that you are the right lawyer to work with.

It is a tiny minority of people who are so focused on price that they will sacrifice good quality legal advice to get the job done cheaply. Those people are not worth your valuable time because, no matter what you say to them, unless you drop the price, they're not going to work with you.

Clients who are focused solely on price tend to be the most difficult; and not only will you regret dropping the price, you’ll then regret working with them because they will make your life more difficult as time goes on.

They’re not the clients you want to build your business around.

Reframe the Objection as Opportunity

Think through this response - what you are doing is uncovering their real motive.

And by asking that question, you are not just doing yourself a favour, but you're doing them a favour too. You are giving them the out if they are price sensitive - to go back to the lawyer who's offered the cheaper price and move forward with them.

But if they're driven by value, they will let you know that this is their concern. Something has been missing and it's your opportunity to take them through why they should work with you.

So rather than seeing this as an arrogant response, think of it as an opportunity for you to focus your time on the best prospects and the best clients, and give the client the opportunity to tell you what their real motive is.

Putting It Into Practice

Here’s how you can prepare:

1. Know your value inside out: Be ready to articulate what makes your service worth the price, from your expertise to your results.

2. Practice the response: Role-play with a colleague or mentor until it feels natural. Confidence is key.

3. Reflect on your ideal client: Are you targeting value-focused clients, or do you need to refine your strategy?

The next time a prospect brings up competitor pricing, don’t panic. Use it as an opportunity to reinforce your value and focus on the clients who truly appreciate what you bring to the table.

—--

Handling price objections isn’t about arrogance—it’s about knowing your worth and standing by it. By responding confidently and filtering the right clients, you’ll set the foundation for stronger, more rewarding client relationships.

In The BD Breakthrough Blueprint®, we take you through objections just like this and teach you how to handle and overcome them. With practical tools and strategies, it’s your guide to becoming a rainmaker and trusted advisor.

Get started—download The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® now

Unlock your rainmaking potential

BD Breakthrough Blueprint®

My digital education course gives you the tools you'll need to become a 21st century rainmaker and trusted advisor.

Here's what The BD Breakthrough Blueprint® can help you achieve:

• Win more work from better clients;

• Become a more confident rainmaker;

• Develop a focused BD mindset;

• Build a larger pipeline of prospective clients;

• Change the narrative with referrers and intermediaries;

• Organic business growth as the foundation for the future;

• Fast-track your career to partnership or owning your own legal business;

And so much more.

All this for only £495

Or pay 5 x £100 over 5 months.

And it starts with you clicking the link and buying your copy:

https://www.legalbalanceinstitute.com

.

Start this exciting journey now and become the rainmaker you've always wanted to be.

Fancy a free e-book about lawyers?

Get your free copy of 'Bullsh*t & Bollo*ks Excuses' now

All those lawyer conversations I’ve posted about over the years.

All in one place.

You’ll laugh.

You’ll cry.

You’ll despair.

You’ll feel great that you’ve never said some of this… or have you?

Here it is, for your reading pleasure - just click this link.