Free whitepaper · 21 pages
Why most law firms are running three businesses, but managing them as one.
Twelve core activities of a law firm, scored for what AI can do, what firms actually use, and who keeps the value.
Your advisory work, your repeat process work and your commodity work sit on one P&L, one rate card and one set of partner expectations. AI is changing the economics of each of them in a different direction, at a different speed.
David Maister's Expertise, Experience and Efficiency model is the clearest lens for seeing that. This paper applies it, activity by activity, to what AI is doing to legal work now.
“The real strategic failure in most law firms is not poor execution. It's running three different businesses under one roof and pretending they are the same business.”
Inside the paper:
- Twelve activities, three matrices. Each core activity mapped to its Maister mode, scored for AI capability against observed adoption, and assessed for who captures the value: the firm, the client or the vendor.
- Six structural patterns, including the eroding middle and why value capture follows Maister's lines.
- What it means for firm leaders, including the talent-pipeline trap as the middle of the spectrum compresses.
The scores are judgments grounded in the published research, and the paper says so plainly: they are best guesses, and readers are invited to challenge the mapping.
A free resource from Sonnet Advisors for managing partners at firms across the UK and Europe.