I spent two days last week at LegalTechTalk, the event that has become Europe’s largest gathering of the people building, buying and arguing about the future of legal work. What I kept circling back to while I was there, a truth that reinforced steadily over the two days until it was impossible to ignore: that for all the energy now pouring into artificial intelligence, law remains, at its core, a people business – and that we are at some risk of losing sight of this precisely because the technology is so exciting.
For the uninitiated, LegalTechTalk is a comparatively young event – it held its first edition in London only in 2024 – but it has grown at remarkable speed, drawing more than 5,500 attendees from over 75 countries this year, alongside some 400 speakers. That it has become one of the largest gatherings in the legal calendar in barely two years tells you something in itself about how much energy, money and attention the profession is now pouring into technology, and why what gets said on its stages is lapped up by the legal community.
The excitement is justified. The tools are remarkable and improving quickly, the investment is real, and the best firms are right to be moving with purpose. And the money involved is eye-watering. If you wish to be one of the five main sponsors, it’ll cost you a cool half million pounds (somewhere in London, the sound of corks popping is audibly noticeable). None of what follows is an argument against any of that. It is an argument about what the technology cannot do, and about where the enduring value in this profession actually sits.
The message underneath the noise
The striking thing was how often the point was made not by skeptics, but by the very people closest to the technology.
Karola Kassai, founder and chief executive of KassaiLaw, put it most directly: “AI makes relationships more important.” Chris Grant, who leads Client Value at Goodwin, returned to the same theme more than once. “It’s a relationship business,” he said, and as more of the routine work is automated, “relationships become more important to drive the business forward.”
Perhaps the most pointed version came from Michael Vasalos, Director of Innovation at Harbottle & Lewis – and it is worth dwelling on the fact that this was the innovation director speaking. “Legal work, for clients, is deeply personal,” he said. “You need someone to guide you through. AI can never replace that.”
I do not think these were throwaway lines or polite hedges. The deeper these practitioners went into the technology, the more insistently they pointed back to the human relationship at the center of the work. That is not a coincidence. It is the most important signal the event sent, and it ran underneath almost everything else.
“It all starts with people”
The same idea surfaced, in a different register, in the conversation between Legora and Linklaters – the Stockholm company whose AI platform Linklaters has now rolled out across all of its offices.
Legora’s chief executive, Max Junestrand, made the case for adoption, and his framing was instructive. “It all starts with people,” he said. His argument was that the tools have to be made genuinely simple to use, because the real obstacle is never the software. It is culture, and the challenge of getting your best and busiest lawyers to actually take it up. Junestrand has spoken of the idea that AI makes the strongest lawyers disproportionately more productive – not the average performer, but the best. That detail matters, and I will return to it.
The deeper these practitioners went into the technology, the more insistently they pointed back to the human relationship at the centre of the work.
Paul Lewis, Linklaters’ firmwide managing partner, was candid about what the firm is already getting from the technology, describing it as “like having an associate on tap, at any time.” The stated ambition was to deliver work “faster, better, cheaper.”
Faster and better, I accept without hesitation. It is the third word that deserves scrutiny. Cheaper for whom?
The evidence that the efficiency is reaching clients is, so far, limited. A survey late last year by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Everlaw found that close to six in ten in-house lawyers had seen no noticeable savings from their outside counsel’s use of AI. Over the same period, the leading U.S. firms pushed standard rates beyond a thousand dollars an hour for the first time, with some partners now well above two thousand. Work that once took ten hours can in principle now take one, yet around nine in ten legal pounds and dollars still move through the billable hour, a structure largely unchanged since the 1950s. The work has become faster. The meter, for the moment, has not. The savings are accruing somewhere; it is not yet obvious they are accruing to the client.
What are clients actually paying for?
This brings me to the most useful contribution I heard all week, from Nick West, Partner and Chief Strategy Officer at Mishcon de Reya. His point cut to the heart of the matter:
“AI is shining a spotlight on unbundling, where law firms have combined process, judgement, risk transference etc, into the billable hour. Do we kill the billable hour? I would argue that we shouldn’t be running our law firms on the billable hour in the future. The question is – what is it that clients are paying for? How do we price it? Expertise and risk transference has real value.”
That is the question the whole industry is now being forced to confront, and it is harder than it first appears. The death of the billable hour has been announced for twenty years, and yet no one has produced a serious alternative that a whole firm can adopt. The difficult cases show why. If a client agrees a fixed fee for a piece of litigation and it settles early, is the full fee still owed? How do you price preventative work – the value of a firm spotting a problem before it materializes, increasingly with AI helping to spot it, where success means that nothing goes wrong and there is no outcome to point to? The billable hour endures not because it is good, but because it answers a question its rivals have not: Who bears the risk when the work is genuinely unpredictable?
Beneath that sits a newer problem, one that barely existed five years ago. Clients increasingly arrive already equipped – with AI-generated assumptions, draft documents, extracted clauses, half-formed strategies and a carefully constructed list of questions. The lawyer is then placed in a genuinely difficult position. Offer real substance, and you may be creating reliance you have neither been paid for nor properly defined. Hold back, and the client wonders why they came to you at all. And whatever you do say can now be taken away and developed elsewhere, including inside a machine, with your judgement faintly visible in a decision you were never instructed to make. Once everything that can be reduced to precedent has been absorbed by the technology, the question becomes unavoidable: What is left that clients should pay a premium for?
The answer is the one it has always been. Judgement.
The forty years behind the line
There is a well-worn story about Picasso. Asked to sketch on a napkin and then quoting an extravagant price, he is challenged by an admirer who protests that it only took him a moment. “No,” he replies, “it has taken me forty years.” The anecdote is almost certainly apocryphal, but it survives because it is true in the way that counts. The price is not for the moment. It is for the forty years of mastery that make the moment possible.
Once everything that can be reduced to precedent has been absorbed by the technology, the question becomes unavoidable: What is left that clients should pay a premium for?
The naive view of AI is that it strips the value out of expertise by commoditizing it. In fact, the opposite is happening. Demand for genuinely complex, high-stakes legal work has not fallen; if anything, the value of expertise and judgement has risen since AI arrived, because the gap between commoditized work and specialized, complex work has widened. The lower tiers of the pyramid are being automated. The summit is becoming rarer, more visible and worth more. The forty years are appreciating, not depreciating.
What remains when you remove the technology
One of the more honest moments of the two days came from Mark Cohen, the founder of LegalMosaic, who told a legal technology conference that he does not really believe in the term “legal tech.” Strip the technology out of the description, and what is this enormous gathering actually composed of? Conversations. The sessions that mattered all resolved into the same thing: people talking to people, building the trust on which instructions are eventually given. That is where lawyers have always done their most valuable work, and it is the part the technology does not touch.
Technology helps. But it does not, by itself, get you into the room with the client. It may help you arrive better prepared, but it does not win the trust that leads to the engagement. Clients do not buy from software. They buy from people they believe in.
The question firms should be asking
So I left with a question that is not, in the end, about technology at all. Are law firms investing enough in their people?
Almost everyone at the event was eager to discuss the tools. Far fewer were discussing, with the same urgency, the human beings who have to use them. Yet if the central proposition is that AI makes the best lawyers disproportionately more productive, then the most important strategic decision a firm can make is not which platform to license. It is how seriously it invests in the people who will turn that technology into a genuine advantage.
That means a great deal more than a license and a login. The tools are one part of it, and an important part. But so is emotional intelligence. So is marketing. So is proper business development training, coaching, and the patient work of raising a lawyer’s profile so that the market understands how good they are. The leading rainmakers drive the firm. They shape its strategy, carry its profitability and are the reason the most complex work arrives in the first place. The growth mindset that everyone invokes does not come from software. It is unlocked by investing in your best people as people.
People respond to that investment. They always have. Which is why I suspect it will prove the smartest return available to any firm at this moment – smarter than relying on technology alone to shortcut the work.
Law is a people business. It was before LegalTechTalk and it will be long after. The genuinely valuable lesson of spending two days surrounded by the most advanced legal technology on earth was that it left me more convinced of this, not less.
Sidebar is an occasional new column from Lawdragon Managing Director David Burgess, offering fresh insight and perspectives on the business and practice of law.
