Redesigning Your Law Firm for 2026. Systems, Pricing, and Tech That Scale

Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of the Dominate Law Podcast, where we empower attorneys as entrepreneurs. Before we jump in, a quick shout out to our sponsor, Equa Marketing. If you are looking to grow your practice, get more visibility and have experts handle your marketing, they are a great team to check out. You can also get a free analysis of your current website and book a complimentary marketing strategy session@ww.dominatelaw.com slash msm dot. All right, let's get into today's topic. We are diving into something every law firm needs to be thinking about right now. Redesigning your law firm for 2026, the systems pricing and technology that actually scale. If you want to grow smarter, improve efficiency, and build a more profitable practice. This episode is for you. Joining us today, we have an incredible group of experts. David Skinner, a global leader in lean legal practice and process improvement.

Maribel Rivera, a marketing strategist and community builder with deep roots in the legal industry. Joseph Tiano, founder of Legal Decoder, and a leading voice in legal tech, analytics and innovation. And Lana Manganello, a business development strategist, helping lawyers build stronger, more profitable practices. This is going to be a great conversation packed with real insights. Let's get started. Thank you to have you here right now. Moving on to our first question of the evening, and this question goes to you, David, which law firm operating habit looks most fragile based on the process work you see across firms?

We were discussing this briefly in the green room, and I, and I had trouble choosing just one, but if I have to pick just one to start with, I'd say that it is that law firms are still relying on the billable hour and individual efforts as the default operating model that they're using. And I think that that combination is becoming increasingly fragile in our work. We often see firms that think the problem is technology, when the deeper issue is that they've never really designed how work is supposed to flow efficiently through the firm.

Okay.

For a long time, you know, firms could get away with that. Why? Because the billable hour, I think, and I don't think I'll get any pushback from this, the billable hour masks a lot of inefficiency, different ways of working, weak scoping, poor delegation, the rework that we engage in when we look at the work of our juniors, but that I think, is becoming much harder to sustain. And one of the key points in our most recent, uh, workshop, which was pricing in an AI enabled world, w we posited that AI doesn't actually reduce the value of legal work, but rather it exposes weak pricing logic and weak operating habits. If lawyers are still pricing by reference to time, that becomes increasingly uncomfortable because clients know that work can be done faster, they can be done more accurately, and that it can be done more efficiently.

Time is no longer a reliable proxy for value. Clients aren't paying you 17 hours of time to prepare a will. They're buying your judgment. They're buying a risk transfer from them to you, to your firm, to your malpractice insurers. They're buying accountability. They're investing in an outcome, but not in hours. So it seems to me that that firms end up in an awkward middle ground, right? Work gets faster and faster. Clients, they expect more certainty, but the lawyers we're still thinking in terms of hours, and that is where profitability starts leaking quietly away. So the habit is relying on the billable hour and on individual effort as a default operating model. But I wanna add in, if I could, to related fragilities that I think make the problem worse. The first is poor delegation. When delegation isn't working, senior attorneys do too much of the routine work, and so they have less time to focus on high value work that requires their knowledge and skills, and which clients will willingly pay for.

The corollary is that juniors are underdeveloped in terms of their skills, and the firm loses the benefit of leverage. Now, that's been an issue for a while, but it becomes, I think, even more fragile when we're talking about an AI enabled environment where the structure of work is changing. The second is the absence of a shared workflow. In many firms, five lawyers will handle the same matter five different ways. In a bad week, one attorney will handle five different, or the same matter five different ways, depending on the day that he happens to find himself in. And I think that leads to week scope control, uneven pricing, and ultimately, if we follow the thread, it leads to inconsistent client service. And that can ruin your reputation and your brand. When you layer technology or AI on top of that environment, you don't fix it. You just speed up inconsistency.

So for me, as I was explaining to Joseph before this, the real fragility is not in one isolated habit. It's in a pattern reliance on time as an economic model, reliance on individual effort instead of, um, properly delegating and deliberate leverage, and also reliance on, um, individual effort rather than systems and, and process design. Firms that will scale are the ones that redesign how work is done that align pricing with value, and then ensure the right work is being done by the right people in a consistent way. If I could just wrap, I'd say I'd leave it this way. Law firms are still running on time and individual effort, and that model is breaking down. AI is exposing that time isn't value. So unless firms redesign how workflows, how it's delegated and how it's priced, I think that profitability is gonna continue to leak quietly away.

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. You could go on and on about this question. I

Could <laugh>, but I know the others don't wanna hear me.

<laugh>. It's not that we don't want to hear you, it's about a matter of time. So now moving on to the second question for Maribel. Yeah. What adopt adoption effort have you seen stall find strong enthusiasm, and what did that failure reveal about how legal teams absorb change?

So I don't think it's just one adoption effort. I think there's various, right? One thing I've seen, uh, stall is when it it, and it goes across any tool that law firms are bringing in or any or organization is bringing in. It's all of the excitement because it's approved, it is impressive in a demo. Uh, even though it may not work in real time, uh, leadership sees the potential, but nobody has really answered a basic question, do we actually need this tool in the environment? What is it doing in the environment? Um, from what I hear across, uh, the asaid membership on a global scale and the broader legal industry, adoption slows down when teams can't clearly say what the tool is replacing, what is it, what it is improving, um, how it fits into the current tech stack that they may have. Uh, if it adds another platform, another process, or another layer of review without reducing friction somewhere, somewhere else, people start to see it as one more thing to manage rather than a meaningful improvement.

Um, it ends up being revealing that legal teams absorb change in a very practical way. They're not looking for innovation for innovation's sake, even though we are in a, in occurrence era where everyone thinks let's just innovate to innovate. Um, they wanna know whether this makes the work better, faster, more defensible, right? In addition to everything else, is it defensible? What are the risk that we are taking, introducing this? Um, and, uh, to David's point, the time, the billable hour, all of those other things, they wanna understand that, and they wanna know if that fits into the reality of how legal work really gets done. Approval may open the door, but the relevance is what helps, um, adoption moving, right? That's what makes it move across, uh, and helps it to scale within an organization.

I think there's a lot of a blurring line here also, Maribel, when, when you look at adoption, and you look at the statistics out there, right? The adoption rate that gets published in the industry right now is, is there 72% adoption rate? Well, to me, when I hear that 72% adoption, what that translates to my brain is 72% of the people in the legal industry have bought a product. Now, whether they're actually using that product is a whole different story. I mean, do are you seeing that in in, in the course of your professional life?

Definitely. Which comes back to you, right? We've got lots of tech stacks out there that of many individuals are like, we don't use half the tech stack. So now we're just introducing another item into that TE tech stack, right? Another tool, another technology, another solution, another platform. So here goes something else, but we're not looking at the full tech stack and kind of trying to say, how do we implement this correctly?

Yeah. Seems

Me. Sorry, I I I just wanted to riff on that super briefly and say, yeah, of course. One of the things that we talk to our clients about doing is undertaking a tech audit, right? Yep. Look at your tech stack, see what, see what is in the tech stack, and then through a survey, SurveyMonkey or otherwise, you can create it. It's not rocket science. You can get AI to help you create the survey. What level of skill do your people across all levels, senior attorneys write down to the receptionist, what skill level do they have on the core software platforms that are critical to their particular function? And I guarantee you're gonna find it. It's a lot lower than people anticipate. And firms, large firms, and, and you'll know this, Joseph invest millions of dollars annually in software licenses and maintenance, yet their attorneys are not spending the time required to learn, because they always believe the billable work takes precedence. And we have told clients outright told, managing partners, when you get a new software platform, your edict has to be nothing is more important than learning this new tool. We've invested in it for a reason. I'm the first to sign up. I'm gonna do all the training. If I can find the do time to do the training, you can too. And that, I think is a very important message. It's about leadership.

No, you're spot on, David. I mean, there's too much of a ready, fire aim when it comes to <laugh>. A, a adoption of, of a, any, whether it's AI or a different type of legal tech tools. And what, when you gloss over or you skip the needs assessment, the readiness assessment, the gap analysis, and the implementation and the training, you got shelfware.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And Joseph, another question for you now here. So where are legal bias becoming less tolerant of traditional pricing or staffing assumptions? And why does that shift matter now?

Well, I, I mean, David touched on it earlier, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative>. It's, it's mm-hmm <affirmative>. You know, look, clients don't buy billable hours. Clients buy outcomes. Clients buy results. Clients by capacity, clients by judgment, clients by expertise. They don't buy billable hours, right? And in, in using, you know, the billable hours as a proxy for value is, it's a fool's errand, right? And so where, where I think it breaks down now is if you're looking at a lot of the tools that are out there, and I just had a cloud just sitting in the classroom here at a SU lot. I just taught a class on, on, on, on AI implementation here. And, and, you know, we looked at tools like Lara and Harvey and VL and so forth. And if you take a look at what capabilities these tools have, they become more of a replacement of labor as opposed to, um, as opposed to a tool.

Because there's a lot of things that AI can do on its own. So when it comes to sort of the historic billing models as, as, as, as Dave Wood was alluding to, right? There's that compression of time, right? You could use these tools to do in a fraction of the 20 hours that it used to take the, the, the will that, that David was talking about. And so, I, I think, I think the smart buyers of legal services and the smart sellers of legal services are disaggregating the tasks that they used to pay for on an hourly basis, segmenting them into this task has to be done only by humans. This task can be done by ai. And here's tasks that some hybrid of AI enablement will be satisfactory to produce the outcomes that clients want in the future. And when you start looking at the, at the world of the billable hour, through that lens, you can start repricing things at a task in a value level rather than on an hourly level.

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. And Lana. So the next question here. When firms want growth and focus at the same time, which priorities should leadership protect first?

So I would say focus, without question, how do I sound? 'cause I know when we went into this room, I went into the abyss. So

<laugh>, you sound amazing, I'm

Back. Um, so I would say focus, um, and I'd go further to say that the tension between growth and focus is often a false problem that firms create for themselves, treating growth as a goal rather than an outcome. Um, and when leadership is trying to pursue both simultaneously without a clear hierarchy, what I actually see happen is that neither really is protected. And partners start saying yes to work that is outside of the firm's core strengths, because revenue is revenue, um, and practice groups are expanding into adjacent areas without really the infrastructure needed to support them. And, you know, lateral hiring is a focus, and it gets driven by this opportunity of growth rather than strategy. And over time, the firm becomes a collection of businesses, which we all see, um, and that, you know, they share the same name, um, rather than having a real coherent institution with a point of view.

And so I think that, you know, focus is the precondition for growth. And that is what compounds and when a firm has true clarity about who it serves, what problems it solves, and why it is distinctively positioned to solve them, every business development decision gets a lot easier. Um, and you know, which referrals and relationships you wanna invest in, you know, which clients you really need to be focusing on, where you can go deeper with them. You know what to start saying no to, what you should be passing on. Um, and honestly, that's one of the hardest things that I see, you know, in law firms, is people knowing what they can say no to. Um, and I think the other reason to protect focus is, um, it's most at risk. So growth pressure is relentless and comes from everywhere. Um, and partners are worried about their books, and management is worried about revenue targets, and laterals want to expand the firm footprint because that's generally why they're brought in.

Um, and no one is, is coming into the meeting arguing for doing less. So if leadership isn't actively protecting focus, it erodes by default, and that's through, you know, one compromise at a time. So what I tell firm leaders is that growth is actually so much easier to generate when focus is locked in, uh, because you stop spreading business development energy across so many targets and relationships, and you get really great at something specific, and your clients notice and referral sources have a really, uh, a much clearer story to understand, um, and, you know, are able to, to tell this story about you and the right work starts to find you. And that's a much more sustainable model for growth. Um, and so, you know, the alternative of taking, saying yes to everything that comes through the door and hoping it adds up to something coherent is, you know, a model that may have worked in the past, but I think it, it really creates a recipe for a busier version of the same problems that you already have.

You know, one of the interesting things that I've, I've learned from Lon and I have, have, have written and spoken a lot together now, and one of the things that she's really good at is, is, is is teaching lawyers to articulate their value. I practiced law for 20 years and someone said, you know, what value do you bring to me? It's like, well, I'm a great lawyer. Well, like, that's great. Like, but shows everybody else right next to you table. Everybody else is

Great. That's table stakes.

It's table stakes, isn't it? Isn't that right, David?

Yeah. Yeah. And,

And what's really important I is, is to be able to articulate and coach the partners. And Laa does an excellent job at this. Some I pleasure of working with Maribel yet is on, on these type of things either, but, but it's, it's being able to articulate the value that you bring to your client that goes beyond, I'm just a good lawyer, right? And, and, and it's, it's very tailored, it's very unique to each individual partner. But people who are lawyers sometimes get myopic on it, and they don't realize that they're not selling legal services. They're selling things that are almost intangible, that are supplemental to those legal services, largely really good at, at, at, at helping the partners at law firms understand that.

So, uh, so I I I wanna just echo and support, uh, what Lana was saying. I think understanding who, how and why are critical to anyone's success. You cannot distinguish yourself from the market, and you can't speak with the le the the level of passion, uh, and authority that is required to distinguish yourself unless you really understand who you serve, how you serve them, and why that matters to them, not to you beyond the income. My business partner and life partner of 34 years, uh, loves to say, Lana, that a law firm is nothing more than a group of individuals. We live in Montreal that are sharing central heating in the winter and air conditioning in the summer. Beyond that, they're all separate animals, all in it for their own interest. And the last thing I wanna say is a hundred percent, when you learn to say no, you're actually opening space to say yes to something that it better fits with your strategy, your objective, your who, how, and why. So I applaud anybody who says no to an opportunity because they realize there's a yes to be had that may be more valuable.

Yeah. All, all revenue's not created equal.

No,

Exactly. And now, Lana, tell us about a growth initiative that faulted because lawyer behavior never changed and what that taught you.

Um, okay, I'll jump into this. We, we were talking about throwing bricks, but so one thing that I think consistently

<laugh> for the first bricks, bricks and glass houses, <laugh>.

I mean, I feel like no fear the legal profession is a glass house at this point. Um, and, um, so one thing that I, you know, we've been talking about for a long time are cross-selling and collaboration. And so, you know, law firms are recognizing we're leaving money on the table because our attorneys are not cross-selling. And so the, the firm announces, you know, we are now starting an initiative where we're going to be very intentional about cross-selling and collaboration. And maybe we put together an industry group, we're bringing in consultants and doing some training. And you know, on paper and in the conversation, everything makes sense. This is in the best interest of the clients. We're going to offer better legal work. Uh, the solutions will be better. This makes sense across the board. And, uh, you know, maybe there's a little momentum initially, and then things oftentimes just fizzle out and die.

And you see that the reason is pretty straightforward and it's the compensation system, um, you know, the way that lawyers are rewarded, um, through, in, you know, origination credit, different kinds of credit. It truly is disincentivizing any of this kind of collaboration. Um, and, you know, we may be talking about the meaningful upside, but at the end of the day, the economics of being a lawyer and a partner is punishing that behavior. And at the end of the day, you know, behavior is going to follow incentives, not mission statements. And so I see this now with, um, professional development. Everything goes back to what, how are these lawyers financially incentivized to take on these different behaviors? And so, you know, culture is truly what the firm is measuring and rewarding not what it says it believes. And so until the compensation structures actually share credit in, in a way that makes collaboration economically rational for the individual partners, you're not going to get collaboration. And I find that, uh, law firms operate exactly as they're designed to, to operate. And so <laugh> that operation, in my opinion, is something that, you know, we're talking about the economics and kind of boiling it down. And I think reimagining the partnership model and the compensation model is definitely kind of next on the horizon of, uh, things that will need to pop up to really get the behaviors that we've all decided are the, the best ways to move forward.

Yeah, I mean, and, and you know, we've been, I mean, and, and the compensation model candidly is, is, is is in, I mean, it's, it's intertwined with the billable hour in so many different ways. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. You know, we've been hearing about the death, the billable hour for as long as, I mean, like, this is going on like 25 years or maybe more. And you know, what's interesting is, is is that, you know, the a LSPs were supposed to crush the billable hour. Insourcing was supposed to crush the billable hour, and they've all made significant dents. But now I don't think we've ever seen something with a seismic force that's capable of not killing the billable hour, but forcing it to be reshaping, um, as much as artificial intelligence. I mean, it, you know, the billable hour and the amount that you can generate and leverage from a profitability perspective vastly changes when, when there's that kind of displacement by technology. It, it's, and you know, we've written, Lana and I, and one of our other colleagues, Nancy Rappaport, have written about, you know, law firms are gonna have to rethink what their, what their economic model looks like going forward, because we can't point to ours as the proxy for, I mean, it was always inappropriate to do so in some respects, but it was the best that we had. But now there's just no correlation between value and billable hours in this new, in this new AI and powered age.

So I, I would like to toss in a couple of quick, um, obs observations. I agree with both of you tremendously. Um, I think that it also goes Lana to, uh, to associate pay. Uh, we have had clients where the partners have a disincentive to push work down to delegate work down to an appropriate level. 'cause they make more money when they keep it themselves. Yeah. The corollary. And that's the third time in this very short meeting that someone has used corollary. I've used it twice and Joe's used it once, and it's not a very common word. But anyway, uh, the corollary is that the, the, uh, the partners hoard the work and the associates languish their professional development isn't properly being looked forward to because they're not getting the work, because the partners are hoarding it. Because it's all about my origination credit and my piece of the pie is a function of the work that I control.

So they're not distributing work downwards. This is in an AM law 100 firm. We're not distributing work downwards because it pays me better when I keep the work myself, which just blows a hole in the whole sort of, how do we train. Which brings me to my second point about sort of AI and value. First I worry about the future of junior attorneys. 'cause how are they ever going to understand that when they look at this as manifestly, um, hallucination by you name the AI system? They can't because they never had a chance to do the research themselves, learn how to do research and figure out the skillset and the knowledge that's gonna make them really sharp to the point about value and the disruption of ai. The Supreme Court of Virginia in November issued a very important opinion, which if people aren't aware of, they should become aware of.

And it makes a very clear statement that just because you're using AI does not mean that you can't charge, you know, $500 for something that AI did in three and a half minutes. The ethical obligation is on us to explain to our clients the basis upon which we are charging. And to come back to Joe's point and to the point I made earlier, clients are buying our judgment, um, the allocation of risk or the reallocation of risk, partly to us, our ability to find the nuance. When you're standing up in court and you suddenly decide you are not gonna put the lead witness on the stand, that took you an instant in time. But it may be what saves the case. We need to get away from the notion that we must bill by the hour, and that that is the only proxy for value. AI doesn't make that impossible when we mentally shift to the perspective that they're not buying our time, they're buying our skills, our knowledge, our judgment, and all that other stuff, which is slightly intangible. And I think therein lies some, you know, sun at the, at on the horizon that we should all be looking towards.

Yeah. That, uh, that's so great that you brought up <laugh>. It's so great that you brought up, um, the Virginia, uh, opinion, David, because, um, it, it's, it's, this is coming from the guy who teaches, uh, AI and, and, and, and legal ethics, right? It's so spot on. And, and the, the, the American Bar Association five 12 has got a lot of things right, but when it comes to its interpretation of Rule 1.5, I think it's a little bit wider than Mark. And I love the fact that you brought up with, with the audience, Virginia, there's eight factors, eight factors in rule 1.5, right? The first of the subfactors right, talks about time and hours, right? And then it goes on to talk about another four or five things, and at first sub factor, and then there's seven other Subfactors that you have to factor in. Yet for whatever reason, we just stop at like that first piece of it. And it's like, the rest

Doesn't exist.

The rest doesn't exist. And it's like, well, that's not really true. And, and I, I'm so glad you brought that up, David, be because I, I agree with you. I mean, Virginia got, our, Virginia at least went through the right analysis, whether it proves to be the, the right economics for law firms over time, you know, we'll, we'll see what happens, but as the legal ethicist amongst us, thank you for bringing that up,

<laugh>. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. You're welcome.

Now, that was a great conversation. A big thank you to our speakers, David Skinner, Maribel Rivera, Joseph Tiano, and Lana Manganello. We really appreciate you sharing your insights and experience with us today. If you found this episode helpful, make sure you share it with a friend or colleague who could benefit from it. That is how we help more attorneys grow and succeed. And before we wrap up, another quick reminder about our sponsor, Equa Marketing. If you want to grow your law firm, get more visibility and have a proven team handle your marketing, this is your next step. You can book a complimentary strategy session at www.dominatelaw.com/msm. Finally, don't forget to follow the Dominate Law Podcast and stay tuned for more episodes where we help attorneys build stronger, smarter, and more profitable practices. Thanks again for listening. We will see you in the next episode.