For decades, professionals have lived by the project triangle: you can have it good, cheap, or fast — pick two. That rule made sense when humans were the bottleneck. But AI doesn’t play by those constraints. It works in seconds, never sleeps, and costs next to nothing to replicate. In the AI era, fast is free, cheap is assumed, and good is being redefined. Quality no longer depends on hours worked but on how intelligently you train and prompt your systems. The new value equation isn’t about balancing trade-offs — it’s about building trust, context, and speed into everything you deliver. For law firms and other professional services, this means the old stool is about to splinter. The winners won’t be those who work harder or charge less — but those who teach AI to think in their firm’s voice, embed judgment into automation, and deliver human trust at machine speed.

Does the size of your firm really justify charging higher fees? A recent U.S. court decision suggests it might — but that logic risks confusing size with value. Bigger doesn’t always mean better, and clients don’t pay for square metres of office space: they pay for expertise, outcomes, and confidence.

Two decades of “growth” headlines mask a harsher truth. Taha & Watmough analysis shows many Top 100 UK firms are earning less per lawyer—and partners’ profits are down. Australia won’t be far off. Beware vanity metrics: “fine China of analytics—pretty to look at, but useless at the table.” Get in touch to build sustainable growth.

Data shows that U.S. law firms are continuing to rollback their DEI language but U.K. firms have seen an increase as visibility.

The firm historically stood out for large classes of new partners, though some left Kirkland within a span of one to two years after getting promoted.

Hogan Lovells is staying put in mainland China as several of its US rivals reduce their headcounts or get out altogether.

Has Private Equity Finally Pushed Into California’s Legal Market? This week, California agreed to loosened its laws around law firm ownership, a move long blocked by entrenched legal bodies. Though the change is subtle and carefully constrained, it marks a symbolic crack in the barrier separating capital from the legal profession. In this post, I explore what the reform means — for investor-backed law firms, for traditional practices and for the future of the global legal market.

Alt: a man in a suit and tie is holding a jacket over his shoulder