Do you believe the hourly billable will prevail, or do you think we should move towards more "productised" legal services? Or somewhere in between?

For all the talk about the billable hour and whether it should stay or whether law firms will move to different pricing models (some have); we are still not seeing an industry-wide radical shift in pricing discussions. Why? I don’t believe it boils down to merely lack of will or trying, but because it requires a fundamental change in the way the legal industry places value on its work. 

​​The time-worn "billable hour" business model has been a mainstay of the legal industry since the Second World War. While this model has been extraordinarily profitable for law firms, it has significant drawbacks. It shifts uncertainty to the client and thrives when lawyers work at a punishing pace, leading to burnout and an overall lack of well-being. It promotes working harder over working smarter by rewarding lawyers for maximizing hours billed rather than investment in processes and technology that could help generate the same high-quality work with high costs savings that could be passed on to clients.

People often criticise the billable hour, yet it remains the primary billing method for most law firms today.

There is no getting around it. Technology is making its way into the legal profession.

 “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy

From the outset, I would like to clarify that "the legal profession" consists of different categories. I am active as a business lawyer. Hence, in this article, I speak from a business lawyer's point of view only. I assume that lawyers from other fields of law (for example, the "litigators", who do a lot of court work) may have a different input.

For a large, commercial law firm, here are seven key tools I would want to have in my tech stack:

Legal teams all around the world acknowledge the need to improve their processes, structures, workload and know-how management, while expecting such changes to be implemented in the next five years.