The full text of my opinion piece first published in the Australian Financial Review on 4 March 2021.
Commercial law firms face constant pressure from clients to do more for less.
They can respond in three ways: say it can’t be done and risk losing out to competitors, drop their prices, or make a step change to improve productivity.
Most are pursuing option 3 and are looking to legal operations to make it happen.

What are legal operations?
Legal operations usually include some or all of these disciplines:
- Business Management – commercial managers focused on improving profitability, increasing revenues and optimising efficiency.
- Service Design – workflow and client experience specialists that evaluate, accelerate and support legal process improvement projects. They also often assist with new product development and act as incubators for new business ideas.
- Legal Project Management – project professionals that make legal work tractable, trackable and transparent, for both lawyers and clients.
- Pricing – pricing experts that help partners to have better client conversations, align price with value, protect margins, and where appropriate, use alternative fee arrangements.
- Alternative Legal Services – a team of paralegals, legal technologist and lawyers focused on high-volume process work including e-discovery, transactional and dispute support, language editing, document review and IP management.
Australian experience
In Australia, some very large national firms have embraced a centralised approach to legal operations. Others have adopted a more decentralised model with each major practice group acquiring the resources specific to their needs.
Over time, I would expect most firms will move to a model of centralised governance to avoid duplication and facilitate the sharing of knowledge and applications. At the same time, operational specialists need to work right at the coalface to find smarter ways to deliver more for less.
Innovation roles will be also subsumed into legal operations. Legal secretaries and assistants will still work directly with local lawyers but will be more connected with and directed by legal operations.
In medium-sized and smaller law firms, a new business service function will likely emerge with the status of HR, marketing and finance. It will often start with outsourcing basic IT services – hardware, software and helpdesk – and the insourcing of specialist tech-savvy resources to help lift productivity and client connection in key practice areas. Once this is established, other roles involved in supporting legal service delivery will enter the legal operations orbit.
New career pathways
This emerging area of legal operations is also creating an alternative – and attractive – career path for lawyers.
They benefit from a deep knowledge of the intrinsic needs within a legal workflow, but also enjoy the respect of the various stakeholders involved in migrating to a new way of working.
MinterEllison offers new lawyers the option of entering its Legal Operations Graduate Program. The program gives candidates exposure to lean six sigma, design thinking, change management and agile methodologies. The firm recently graduated its first cohort and is reported to be delighted with the outcomes so far.
The growth of legal operations is not just confined to law firms.
Stuart Fuller, the global head of KPMG Legal Services, recently predicted that “half of the [in-house] legal team will not be lawyers by 2025”.
Fuller says the use of automated solutions, chatbots and other forms of productised legal services will rise, and these will need support from lawyers as well as a more multidisciplinary workforce with different skill sets. As a result, the proportion of legal work done by paralegals, data analysts, operational experts and other specialists might rise to the point where legal professionals become a minority.
The key message is that the path to improved productivity is not pressuring lawyers to bill more time, but rather working smarter with the evolving disciplines of legal operations.
culture, growth, innovation, planning, professional service firms, strategy management, war for talent
The empire strikes back
In Articles, Commentary, Legal Technology on 8 October 2021 at 11:20 amThe full text of my opinion piece first published in the Australian Financial Review on 7 October 2021.
The biggest structural change in the Australian legal market over the past 30 years has been the growth of in-house legal teams.
But while the vast majority of current in-house solicitors received their initial training in private law firms and then moved across to the client side, I predict that the next decade will see a reversal of this trend, particularly at more senior levels.
In comparing the employee value proposition of in-house versus private practice, there are five areas where law firms are fighting back.
Flexibility
In a post-COVID-19 world, very few law firms will return to a work schedule of 9 to 5, five days a week, in the office. They will be far more accommodating of lawyers seeking to work from home for part of the week, or those wanting to work across different time slots in the day or to limit the number of workdays.
Any perceived advantage that in-house roles were more flexible has been eliminated by law firms learning to operate effectively in an anywhere anytime model.
Workload
For many years, the lure of in-house has been roles with more work-life balance, less stress, and no timesheets.
While no timesheets are still a point of difference, most in-house lawyers are now reportedly working extremely long hours and are stretched thin. The pressure for them to do more with less is incessant, and the demands on their time are likely to grow rather than diminish.
On the other side of the fence, many law firms are rejigging the workload of graduates and early career lawyers to be far more sustainable. They have also stepped up their programs focused on employee mental health and wellbeing.
Technology
Association of Corporate Counsel research suggests General Counsel are constrained in adopting technology by restrictions on capital expenditure and a lack of time to implement new systems.
Many law firms, in contrast, are ramping up their technology investment and experimentation. The recent Thomson Reuters State of the Legal Market found that law firms spent over $22,000 per lawyer on legal technology in FY21. The same paper revealed that 30 out of the 50 largest law firms in Australia now have an innovation function.
Over time, the technology gap between in-house and private will grow. A career move in-house may become to be seen as a step back in time – a move to a job using old and blunt tools of the trade.
Income
Data from legal recruiters Mahlab suggests in-house teams pay more for 3 to 7-year PQE lawyers, but after that, the differential starts to swing the other way. Equity partners in premium law firms are now earning incomes that far exceed their peers in in-house roles, save for a few GCs of major listed companies that enjoy exceptional incentive arrangements.
Private practice salaries and benefits are estimated to increase by 8 to 10% in the coming years. It will be very hard for in-house to price match given budget constraints and the need for consistency across organisation-wide pay scales. To the chagrin of many CFOs, in-house lawyers are already the most expensive people on their payroll outside the C-suite.
Culture
“It’s a boys’ club”, has been a common refrain of female lawyers leaving private practice. With an industry average of just under one-third of female law firm partners, their complaint may have had just cause, till now.
Most of the top 30 law firms across Australia have fully committed to a 40:40:20 or an equivalent diversity goal at partner level. Significant efforts are being made to address unconscious bias and to eliminate sexist language and behaviour. More senior leadership roles are filled by women. Comprehensive diversity and inclusion programs are now the norm.
The progress is slow, but the prevailing culture across many law firms is shifting on gender issues.
If trends in the five areas described above persist, the employee value proposition of in-house will become less compelling. With increasing demand, in-house teams will have to build their own capacity by hiring more graduates and invest in early-career legal and commercial training.
This is good news for law firms; after years of training young talent only to lose them to in-house roles, the shoe will comfortably fit on the other foot.
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