Hello legal innovators!
This month, we’re diving into:
Rock & Roll Interview: Virgin Atlantic’s Julian Homerstone on why the new age isn’t about AI – it’s about people, purpose, and heart.
GC Survival Guide: Zentiva’s Tereza Ber on navigating 30+ markets, regulation as existential threat, and why legal now shapes investment decisions.
The Billable Hour’s Death: Why AI is exposing law firm economics that often made no sense – and who’s ready for what comes next.
Donkeys and Golden Bricks: Alastair Morrison’s brutal diagnosis of why firms clinging to input-based models won’t survive the decade.
The Legal Tech Trap: Clio hits $5 billion – and why your vendor might become your competitor.
Now, let’s jump right in!
GC of Virgin Atlantic on Why The New Age Isn’t About AI At All
“Technology is an enabler, but people remain the differentiator.”
Julian Homerstone, General Counsel at Virgin Atlantic, cuts through the AI hype with a simple thesis: “The new age isn’t just about AI or technology. It’s about how we combine people and purpose with this new digital capability.”
What Only Humans Can Do:
- Empathy
- Creativity
- Integrity
- Leadership
“What really defines this moment is how we use technology to elevate judgement, to make smarter decisions, and to focus on what only humans can do.”
The Virgin Atlantic Lesson: “We’ve always believed in the power of innovation, guided naturally by our people, purpose and heart. I believe the same to be generally true for the legal profession.”
The North Star: “The future belongs to those who embrace technology without losing the north star of people, purpose and heart.”
Everyone’s obsessing over the technology. The real competitive advantage? Using that technology to amplify what makes humans irreplaceable.
Is your organisation treating people as the differentiator, or as the thing technology will eventually replace?
GC Survival Guide: Navigating the 2026 Minefield
In the high-stakes world of corporate legal leadership, survival isn’t about playing defence anymore – it’s about strategic transformation.
Zentiva’s Tereza Ber manages legal across 30+ markets and 50 entities. “It’s like playing multiple games of chess – different countries, different timelines, different rules, which can change mid-game.”
The shift? Legal is no longer brought in after decisions are made. Ber’s team shapes where Zentiva invests, how it structures growth, and which risks are worth taking. “Legal work is most rewarding when it visibly improves outcomes.”
On AI, Ber is pragmatic: “AI is infrastructure, not a vision statement. Used well, it manages scale, consistency, and speed. Used poorly, it creates risk.”
The objective isn’t replacing lawyers, it’s freeing them. “AI should create the space for lawyers to be closer to the business: listening, challenging, building real relationships – simply doing the human work that makes the job meaningful.
Takeaway: The GC role is no longer about backstopping. It’s about judgment – knowing when to enable speed, when to slow things down, and where lines must be drawn.
Is your legal team shaping decisions or just validating them?
AI Is Killing The Billable Hour. The Real Question Is What Comes Next.
The billable hour isn’t dying because of AI. It’s dying because it never made sense.
As Stephanie Corey and Ken Callander argue, the billable hour persisted not because it reflected value, but because it absorbed uncertainty. It shifted risk away from firms and onto clients, masking inefficiency rather than resolving it.
AI removes that hedge.
When intelligent systems complete legal tasks faster and cheaper, time stops working as a credible proxy for value. But here’s the problem: many in-house teams pushing for change aren’t operationally ready for what comes next.
The Hidden Gaps Exposed:
- Intake processes never standardised
- Workflows that differ matter to matter
- Metrics tracking activity, not impact
- Governance relying on informal judgment
These gaps were manageable when time absorbed the risk. They’re not in an AI-driven model.
The Overlooked Win: Properly structured fixed-fee arrangements eliminate invoice review entirely. In-house teams report spending 10–20% of their time reviewing line-item bills. That burden disappears with defined scopes and predetermined schedules.
Zaven’s view: AI alone won’t kill the billable hour. High-stakes matters, think complex litigation or bet-the-company M&A negotiations will continue to sit comfortably within an hourly model, often blended with abort discounts or success fees.
If firms keep lawyers meaningfully busy (and that doesn’t necessarily mean 2,500 hours a year), the hourly model survives. Imagine a lawyer handling 15 matters a day with AI instead of five. Prompting, refining, challenging and stress-testing AI output is still legal work. It’s still billable. Targets can still be met.
AI infrastructure will simply become a cost of doing business like any other software. And AI costs are already trending down.
But if utilisation drops, something has to give:
• headcount
• compensation
• billing targets
The other big question: will in-house teams truly insource more? That requires hiring for those who are really serious about it beyond just allocating some more work to existing in house staff for time regained internally which feels counterintuitive in the current climate. Or will in house departments outsource more because per-matter fees from outside counsel decrease? Latter being my bet.
Bottom line: AI won’t eliminate the billable hour. But it will expose inefficiencies, fast.
The model doesn’t disappear. It adapts. There has probably never been a better moment to demand the billable hour from your law firm for AI assisted work!
Donkeys, Golden Bricks, and the Death of Law Firm Economics
Alastair Morrison, named Europe’s Most Innovative Lawyer by the Financial Times in 2019, delivers a brutal diagnosis of legal’s broken economic model.
The Golden Bricks Problem: Each donkey (lawyer) has a year to carry as many bricks up a hill as possible. The heavier the bricks, the greater the reward. The risk of brick inflation? Passed on to clients. They really are golden bricks.
“A professor would have little truck with a student who complained about their grade because they worked really hard. The point is that the student’s input is irrelevant. It is the output that matters. Clients are no different.”
The Conundrum: Law firms are now experimenting with machines that reduce both the weight and number of bricks. Lawyers love them – the load is lighter, the path is smooth. But if fewer heavy bricks are required, how do lawyers stay incentivised the way they’re used to?
The Incoherence: “Many clients want two things at once: to pay by the hour, and to pay for far fewer hours. That may be understandable in the short term, but it is incoherent in the long term.”
The Future – SaSaaS: If the means of production have changed, then the means of valuing production must change too. Morrison’s prediction: Seats + SaaS = SaSaaS. Lawyers coupled with software products delivering outcomes.
The Warning: “Many firms will not adapt their value proposition or economic model in time to exist beyond the retirement age of partners currently in their early fifties.”
Is your firm building for outputs, or clinging to golden bricks?
The Legal Tech Land Grab: Why Consolidation Should Worry Law Firms
Clio has hit a $5 billion valuation. Their billion-dollar acquisition of vLex signals what’s coming: end-to-end super-platforms pitching AI-enabled research, case management, document generation, and workflows all in one place.
It’s a potent proposition. But the industry should be cautious about what it’s handing over.
The Platform Playbook: Build a platform to intermediate a relationship. Capture as much value from that service as possible. In the age of AI, lawyers are about to speed-run a lesson in platform power.
The Healthcare Warning: Epic dominates electronic health records. That dominance gives Epic enormous influence over how health systems use their data. They’ve since leveraged that power to become involved in actual care – algorithmic risk tools, patient-facing “agents,” carving ever more value out of the doctor-patient relationship.
Legal tech is following the same trajectory.
The Gradual Takeover: It starts by matching clients with lawyers. Then document libraries. Then chatbots for limited-scope help. Then automated “co-pilots” for in-house teams. Then, in the right regulatory environment, a platform-powered law firm itself.
“What better way to build and fine-tune a model than with the help of thousands of expert users?”
Yesterday, vendors created proprietary research databases. Today, they’re absorbing decades of knowledge and specialised workflows to train custom AI models. A firm might one day compete with its one-time vendor, powered by knowledge extracted from that firm and many others.
Provocative Question: Are you training your future competitor?
This month’s quote
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” – Charles Darwin
As February draws to a close and March begins, our articles reveal an industry where adaptability has become the only competitive advantage.
Darwin’s insight cuts to the heart of what we’re seeing. Alastair Morrison warns that firms clinging to “golden bricks” and input-based models won’t survive the decade – not because they lack talent, but because they won’t adapt. Stephanie Corey and Ken Callander argue the billable hour’s death exposes operational gaps that time used to hide. Meanwhile, Clio’s $5 billion valuation signals a consolidation wave that could see vendors become competitors.
The responsive are already pulling ahead. Tereza Ber is reshaping Zentiva’s legal function across 30+ markets whilst navigating existential regulatory threats. Julian Homerstone reminds us that technology is the enabler, but people remain the differentiator.
Strength and intelligence aren’t enough. The legal profession is discovering what Darwin knew all along: survival belongs to those who respond.
