The top goal for most lawyers - but especially junior lawyers - is to rack up as many billable hours as possible. In fact, many spend the first parts of their careers fighting tooth and nail to get as much work as possible, to get invited along to client meetings and to take on their very own clients. As a result, it’s not uncommon for lawyers to work upwards of 80+ hours a week.
Yet, for the lawyers who have made their way up the ranks to nab a leadership position at a law firm, a large part of the role is spent leading teams, overseeing workloads and measuring performance.
This might be the perfect setup for some, but others are discontent spending less time practicing the law – the job they’ve spent decades working towards – in favour of management responsibilities.
A new UUֱ report – the Rise of the Legal Consultant – investigates the growing number of lawyers who are trading in their law firm partner salaries for roles as legal consultants at alternative platforms. The fee-sharing law firms such as Keystone Law, gunnercooke and Taylor Rose are a commonly-sought-after option, with experts predicting a third of all UK lawyers could be working for one by 2026.#
The report interviewed a number of senior lawyers to get a better gauge as to why. Private property lawyer, Ian Cooke, who worked at Norton Rose Fulbright and later as an equity partner at Charles Russell Speechlys for more than 20 years, said he was spending too much time on management tasks instead of practicing the law.
“I’ve always loved the law, always loved looking after clients, but the thing about getting senior in a big City law practice is that you can pick up a lot of management responsibilities and I felt my practice was being a bit ignored—I didn’t become a lawyer to be a manager,” said Cooke, who now works as a legal consultant at Keystone Law.
Cooke is not alone – corporate lawyer Nick Ducker traded in his equity partnership at Manchester-based firm Shammah Nicholls to work as a legal consultant at gunnercooke because he wanted to spend more time on client work rather than management committee meetings.
“The whole model made perfect sense to me, the flexibility around the way you work but more importantly around the way that you interact with your clients,” he said. “The profession has a certain reputation of billing every minute of every day to the client, but being in gunnercooke on a fixed-fee basis allowed me to just engage better with my clients.”
While some senior legal leaders are leaving their lofty law firm offices in order to spend more time with clients, others are being lured over by the prospect of having a better work life balance.
At platform law firms, lawyers are, in most cases, self-employed and can choose when they work, how often they work and who they work with – it’s completely up to them.
“It can offer things that other law firms can’t, for example the flexibility of someone returning after maternity and being able to work around school hours,” said James Harper, Senior General Counsel at UUֱ. “If you look at the upper echelons of law firms and their lack of diversity, particularly of senior female leadership, that is something that would suit this model and is an opportunity for growth.”
According to a recent survey highlighted in the report, flexible working has become so sought after by legal professionals that it has outranked financial incentive for many – with 60% of midlevel lawyers saying they would consider moving jobs for a better work-life balance, while only 27% saying they would leave for more money.
Some law firms have recognised that the long-hours and poor work-life balance doesn’t suit all and have invented business models that cater to these lawyers, such as Allen & Overy, which launched flexible legal resourcing arm Peerpoint in 2013 and now has over 350 consultant lawyers on its books.
“It’s not a one-size fits all model,” said Carolyn Aldous, Managing Director of Peerpoint. “For some lawyers, they will only work on one deal at a time, and when that deal needs to be done they will work it, and when that deal is not on, they will take a break and manage it accordingly.”
“Other people choose to work for six months a year and then take off the next period to pursue whatever their interest is, so we’ve got professional yachtsmen, we’ve got people who are fiction writers, we have art dealers, property renovators, so some people use their law career to effectively fund the other part of their life.”
Other Magic Circle law firms have similar models in play, such as Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner’s Lawyers on Demand (LoD), Linklaters’ Re:Link and Pinsent Masons’ Vario.
Attracting flexible legal talent will become more and more essential in the years to come, said David Pierce, Chief Commercial Officer at flexible resourcing pioneer firm Axiom Law, which was established in 2002 and has more than 5,000 lawyers on its books.
“The firms that find the best way to keep their talent are going to win, [but] some of them are going to keep succumbing to the talent wars,” he said.
While increased time with clients, partner-like income potential and flexible hours might sound promising, the revenue-share platform model might not be suitable for everyone.
“There are no shortage of platforms but the challenge is how many lawyers are there who genuinely have the sort of following and the business development skills to feed themselves,” said Tony Williams, Founder of Jomati Consultants.
“This model relies on a level of self-sufficiency. Fundamentally it’s a hunter-gatherer mentality. Clearly there are people who can do that but whether there are enough who can consistently do that, that will be a challenge.”
“You’ve got to be disciplined,” said Ducker. “I was told very early on it’s a little bit like leaving school and going to university—you can go to university and have a great time but if you don’t get out of bed in the morning and go to lectures, you’re not going to pass your exams. So you need self-discipline but you also need to be driven and a bit entrepreneurial.”
Family lawyer Zoe Bloom joined Keystone Law 11 years ago after realising the traditional legal career path wasn’t for her.
“I wanted more autonomy and wasn’t really prepared to play the games expected in a traditional practice,” said Bloom.
However, Bloom recently left the leading consultancy firm to establish a new family law boutique practice with Keystone Law colleague Hannah Budd.
“We left Keystone Law for the same reasons we joined; autonomy and independence,” she said. “The consultancy model is fantastic, but you have to accept that it is a commercial business which offers you, the solicitor, facilities – you can take or leave those facilities but you can’t complain or expect to shape them. Over time, our needs changed.”
These alternative legal models are changing the way lawyers work – and we’re also seeing law firms adapting to these shifting demands. Going forward, we are likely to see widespread change impact the legal profession as a new generation of lawyers seeks to apply its own values to the current legal sector.
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