February 24, 2025

 Jan Thornbury

Consulting law firm business of law

Elevate’s recent Law Firm COO Forum gathered a dozen leading law firm COOs and industry experts for a wide-ranging and lively workshop-style discussion focused on how law firms are addressing the challenges and opportunities of today’s legal market. Held under the Chatham House Rule (for you Americans, think ‘off-the-record’), the result was a candid interchange of ideas and insights concerning, first, how COOs are reshaping their firms to ensure resilience and ‘future-proof’ them, and, secondly, the challenges they are facing around adaptation and change, and how they can be overcome.

Rather than trying to summarise the extensive and illuminating discussion into a single blog post, this is the first article in a four-part series covering the key areas we explored: the challenges of future-proofing; how to maximise value from the current operating model while transitioning to the new; capitalising on rapid advances in technology, and managing people through change.

The conversation was timely, given the unprecedented disruption in the legal sector, the heightened unpredictability of doing business in today’s volatile political and economic climate, and the increased risk – e.g., from global crises and cyber-attacks. Combined, those three trends demand supreme agility and adaptive leadership.

Riding the next S-curve

Underpinning the gathering was the premise that the traditional law firm model, defined by the partner pyramid and hourly billing, is approaching the top of its maturity S-curve, and therefore the sector faces an impending ‘sling shot moment’ that creates an imperative to embrace a new paradigm.

The new paradigm will require firms to be clear about their value propositions, including where to position themselves around the business of law vs. the practice of law, and then align their operations and pricing to this.

The right way to transition to the new S-curve is to go from strength to strength, i.e., starting before the traditional model starts to decline and when the new model is already on an upward performance trajectory. For COOs, managing around this inflection point requires them to:

• Maximise value from the present model, maintaining the growth and profitability that are essential to remaining competitive, while ensuring resilience to shocks in a highly unpredictable business environment
• Prepare for a future model in which customer demands, the competitive landscape, delivery of legal services, and employees’ skills and expectations look very different from today

Our COO forum members are already active in reshaping their firms for that transition. The discussion examined in depth their approaches to integrating lawyers, professionals, technology and Alternative Fee Structures (AFAs), highlighting how, as they move to the new model, they can:

• Maximise profitability and return on capital
• Thrive in an era of rapid technological advancement
• Address the human element and the crucial need for change management

The three subsequent posts in this series will address each of these topics in detail, sharing insights and first-hand experiences from our COO Forum. Stay tuned!