Legal consultants are rising. shows that the number of UK lawyers in platform law firms increased by 29% in 2018. On top of that, research from Arden suggests that as many as 3000 of the UK’s 10000 law firms could close or merge in the next five years.
The research illustrates how platform law firms will likely pick up the talent leaving merged or closing firms, which will result in one third of lawyers working for platform firms in the next five years. Lawyers are opting out of traditional law and moving towards legal consultancy.
Is that a positive step? Should lawyers welcome the move? In this article, we explore a recent ³ÉÈËÓ°Òô report and consider the pros and cons of legal consultancy.
We hear constant complaints about admin, bureaucracy, over management in traditional law firms – all of which take time away from client-facing work. Legal consultants, on the other hand, are simply given the right tools to complete the job. They typically work under flat structures, short chains of command, no billing targets, and automated services.
The result is faster decision-making, less admin, less bureaucracy, and more time spent with clients. One example is Ian Cooke, who moved to legal consultancy after three decades in private practice. In the ³ÉÈËÓ°Òô report, Cooke said: ‘The thing about getting senior in a big City law practice is that you can pick up a lot of management responsibilities…I felt my practice was being a bit ignored – I didn’t become a lawyer to be a manager.’
Employment Lawyer echoed Cooke’s analysis, reserving praise for the legal consultancy model: ‘You get all the benefits of being in a firm in terms of resources, but you don’t get all the negatives in terms of targets and politics.’
Legal consultants work under a revenue-sharing model that allows them to keep the bulk of client fees. All excess funds are spent via a central network, which provides tools that lawyers need to fulfil their roles: legal technology, insurance, , and so on.
That means legal consultants choose clients, set schedules, and work the hours they want, without the need for permission. That autonomy is perhaps the most attractive element of legal consultancy. You can often define your work, your hours, even the length of holiday.
Darryl Cooke, co-founder of , sums up the benefits of automation neatly: ‘If [legal consultants] don’t want to work Fridays, they don’t work Fridays. If they want to take six weeks off in the summer, they take six weeks off in the summer.’
More time with clients and greater automation contributes to a better work-life balance, which is one of the key reasons to move jobs in the legal sector. But the benefits stretch beyond autonomy. Legal consultants are more often allowed to work remotely or under hybrid models, with options for longer lunch breaks, longer workdays, and so on.
That work-life balance is attractive to many, but particularly attractive to some. Lawyers who have paused careers to have children or perhaps provide family care will find the legal consultancy particularly appealing, allowing them to balance work with other responsibilities. The flexible legal consultancy model may consequently improve .
Making the switch to legal consultancy can be costly and risky, especially when starting out. must find their own clients, which can result in income loss in the short-term and perhaps even in the longer-term.
‘You are setting up your own business,’ says James Harper, senior general counsel at ³ÉÈËÓ°Òô, ‘and if you don’t have the capital sitting behind you to cover yourself when you’re not going to be earning much…that’s a barrier and it’s also quite scary.’
The teething problems can last longer, simply because legal consultants are not afforded the backing of traditional firms. There is no prescribed work, no designated clients, no guaranteed salary, no big law branding, none of the usual marketing machinery. Simply put, there is broadly less stability for legal consultants. The onus is entirely on the legal consultant.
‘It’s a little bit like leaving school and going to university,’ says ‘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.’
let legal consultants to escape the sometimes-cumbersome hierarchies of traditional firms. Flat structures produce many benefits – less management, shorter chains of command, less bottlenecking, and so on – but one drawback that impacts legal consultants is the broad reduction of collaboration and accountability.
‘You’re not going to get the continuity and collaboration that you get from a traditional law firm where these people work together on a day-to-day basis,’ says Mark Smith, Director of Strategic Markets at ³ÉÈËÓ°Òô, referencing processes in platform law firms. Legal consultants may work remotely, may work in silos, and may find very little support from other legal consultants. They often work alone and are expected to get results alone.
That also leads to . Many legal consultants at platform law firms will have no immediate manager and no obvious hierarchies, meaning they have very little organisation-wide objectives and no designated people holding them to account. Many legal consultants hold themselves to account, which is often more difficult than it seems.
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