An international consortium of seven legal industry leaders and experts, spearheaded by U.K. consultant Richard Tromans, has established a new think tank to catalyze transformation within the legal business model. The initiative focuses specifically on optimizing the methods by which corporate and commercial legal services are delivered and billed.
The think tank, named Changing Legal, concentrates on three interconnected areas: eliminating the billable hour, promoting uniform standards and data utilization, and encouraging alternative models for legal services delivery, including necessary regulatory reform.
The Rationale for Systemic Change
Mr. Tromans, in a conversation with a Human&Legal representative, explained the organization’s mission. “The purpose of it is to support change, to facilitate change, and to connect people who are interested in change,” he stated. He was joined by founding board member Kelly Harbour, director of client relations and innovation at Goulston & Storrs in Boston and director of member engagement for the SALI Alliance.
While the group’s formation was inspired by a blog post Tromans authored on discontinuing the billable hour, its scope quickly expanded. The founders determined that the billable hour could not be effectively supplanted without the simultaneous adoption of consistent taxonomies and the development of viable alternative delivery structures.
Mr. Tromans clarified that the goal is not merely to “abandon” the billable hour, emphasizing the complexity of the shift. “It’s a question of the legal market seeing the way legal services are produced and valued in a different way,” he noted. Despite widespread industry desire to move beyond a time based compensation model, broad adoption remains elusive because prerequisite factors are absent.
According to Mr. Tromans, these necessary preconditions include defining legal work and creating matter taxonomies. “You first need to be able to identify legal work and create matter taxonomies so everyone can at least describe what it is they are trying to produce, as without any standards or benchmarks one cannot easily scope work (and hence people rely on the time method as a default measure),” he explained. Furthermore, he advocated for beginning with the desired outcome and subsequently determining the optimal production method.
Changing Legal views these three elements—moving beyond time based billing, standards and data sharing, and restructuring legal work production—as intrinsically linked. “Moving beyond the billable hour has been explored many times, but often this is in isolation from the other linked systemic issues that connect to it,” Mr. Tromans observed. He concluded, “You can’t just ‘move beyond billable hours’ in one step, there are interconnected changes that have to come with it. That is why things have not changed. And that is what Changing Legal is trying to focus on and help with.”
Connect and Facilitate
A core objective of the think tank is to foster connections and facilitate knowledge exchange among individuals and organizations worldwide dedicated to establishing standards and innovative service delivery models, including the SALI Alliance.
Changing Legal intends to further support change by:
- Normalizing discussions about systemic market change, transitioning the debate from an academic exercise to a central industry concern.
- Building alliances and partnerships with other organizations, businesses, and individuals to form a global movement for market wide change.
- Hosting events and convenings for people and organizations with mutual goals, encouraging them to learn from and motivate one another.
- Producing and distributing thought leadership and industry data to support informed decision making regarding new directions.
Mr. Tromans expressed that the group represents a proactive response to recurring industry challenges. “This is a natural response to every day waking up and seeing the same issues and then thinking, ‘Well, can we do something and not just let’s sit in a corner of Twitter and argue about the billable hour — let’s actually try and do something,’” he said.
Founding Members and the Path Forward
In addition to Mr. Tromans and Ms. Harbour, the founding board members include:
- Helena Hallgarn, cofounder of Virtual Intelligence VQ and vice president of the European Legal Technology Association.
- Sacha Kirk, cofounder and chief marketing officer at Lawcadia.
- Mark Medice, principal at LawVision.
- Patrick Fuller, VP and general manager of ALM Intelligence.
- Lev Breydo, adjunct professor at Villanova University’s Charles Widger School of Law and senior advisor to New American Energy.
Ms. Harbour noted that the prior year demonstrated the legal industry’s capacity for rapid and successful change when necessity demands it. “There has never been a better time to rethink other assumptions about the way the industry operates,” Ms. Harbour asserted. She provided an example: “For example, for many lawyers, being more efficient while managing children at home has become mandatory. We have to find a way to reward that kind of thinking instead of adding pressure to make up those hours.”
Despite this momentum, Mr. Tromans anticipates the shift will be gradual. “This is going to be a slow progress type of project,” he cautioned, estimating that “significant change” will occur over a decade.
