I’ve been around long enough to remember when legal tech meant a new scanner.
At least ten years in the field. Longer than that in law.
Then came November 2022. GPT changed everything.
It changed everything because everyone is learning the process. Which means: you’re a trainee, you’re junior, and you might know more than me.
You have more time. You’re faster. You don’t carry the weight of how things used to be done.
And that’s not something I fear. I love it. I’ve always loved challenging hierarchies. I enjoy bringing a fail-fast mindset into cultures built on fear of failure.
But I still ask myself: where’s my value, then? People management? Process knowledge?Deployment experience inside real organizations? Understanding how structures actually work?
You know, I could keep going. But what I’d like to stress it’s that it’s not knowing the software and the models. Because we’re all learning that together. The seniors and the juniors.
Every update, every paper, every model reshuffles the deck. What you knew last month is already half-obsolete this week.
I speak with law firms and legal departments every day. We talk a lot about pricing. What the client wants. What they value. How much. Why. And this conversation will become louder and louder in the months/years to come.
But there’s another conversation we almost never have. Internal pricing. The unspoken matrix of value inside the firm.
Is a partner still worth ten, twenty, fifty times more than a trainee (and I’m talking salary, not client fees)? What makes a partner a partner? How much of it is knowledge? How much is the equity? How much is the portfolio? How much is the reputation? How much the entrepreneurial risk?
And maybe the real question is this: If I were a trainee today, would I accept that a partner earns so much more than me, like everyone before me did?
Everyone who has ever been a junior in a big firm knows exactly what I’m talking about.
Like most things I write on the blog, I have more questions than answers. And this is one of the hardest ones. Because accepting a ground zero momento sounds great on paper. But it’s much harder in practice.
That said, there is something I know. These are necessary questions. And asking them is already half the work.
