Ben Thomson

UK Law Firms Are Finally Coming for the Billable Hour – Sort Of

Featured, Law Firm Management, Law Firms / June 10, 2026

The billable hour isn’t dead in the UK, but for the first time it’s looking genuinely ill. A growing slice of work is being priced on fixed or value‑based fees, clients are pushing back on “time spent” as a proxy for value, and AI is quietly blowing up the economics of the sacred six‑minute unit.

And we’ve talked about the BH’s death many times before.

The billable hour’s first real wobble

UK legal spend is still mostly billed hourly, but value‑based and fixed‑fee work has crept up to take a sizeable minority share of the market, and it’s moving in one direction. Clients like predictability, finance teams like budgetable numbers, and nobody likes the month‑end surprise when a “quick” matter turns into a timesheet novella.

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America’s Biggest Personal Injury Firm Eyes Billion-Dollar Private Equity Deal — and a Future IPO

Big Law, Power Firms, Power Law Firms - Global, US Law / June 8, 2026

e firm that built its empire on highway billboards and the populist slogan “For the People” is now talking to Wall Street.

Morgan & Morgan, the largest personal injury law firm in the United States, has hired JPMorgan to explore a minority stake sale that could raise more than $1 billion and pave the way for a public listing years from now.

Morgan & Morgan founder John Morgan, a Florida-based billionaire and political donor, confirmed he was exploring deal options in a statement to Bloomberg Law, describing the discussions as “purely exploratory” with no immediate plan or timeline in place. “We’re simply listening to people smarter than us and working to understand the pros and cons,” he told BloombergLaw.

The story, first reported by the Financial Times and subsequently confirmed by Reuters and Bloomberg Law, lands as a landmark moment for the US legal services industry, which has long resisted outside capital while watching adjacent professional services sectors transform under private equity ownership.

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Sex, Secrecy, and AI -How the Eleanor Ross Scandal Blew Up ‘Confidential’ Judicial Discipline

Featured, Law Firms, US Law / May 30, 2026

This is more than a ‘sex scandal’ case and shows that standard redaction and anonymisation techniques are no match for AI‑enhanced pattern matching Ben Thomson, LawFuel contributing editor The “sex in chambers” angle was always going to dominate: a federal judge carrying on an affair with a senior Atlanta police official, including sexual encounters in

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The $8 Billion Fight That Shows Why Litigation Is Still the City’s Ultimate Blood Sport

Headlining, Law Stars - LawFuel's Leading Lawyers Profiles, LawStars, UK Law / May 25, 2026

A monster battle is unfolding in the sprawling claim against audit powerhouse PwC, born from the spectacular implosion of Chinese property behemoth China Evergrande, the most indebted property group in the world.

Senior silks like Richard Handyside KC, the Fountain Court Chambers’ Head, are facing off against those from 3 Verulam Buildings (3VB) where Adrian Beltrami KC represents the liquidators as they battle over allegations of negligence and misrepresentation in the $8.4 billion battle.

The numbers are eye-watering, even by City standards. Evergrande’s liquidators (led by Alvarez & Marsal’s Edward Middleton and Tiffany Wong) are pursuing 57 billion yuan (roughly $8.4 billion) in damages from PwC International, PwC Hong Kong, and PwC’s mainland China arm. They allege serious audit negligence and misrepresentation in the years leading up to Evergrande’s historic collapse, a King-sized property failure in a long list of major property failures.

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Paul Weiss Loses Two More Litigation Partners As Rivals Keep Picking Off Its Bench

Headlining, US Law / May 25, 2026

Paul Weiss Loses Two More Litigators As “Everything Is Fine” Narrative Gets Harder To Sell Ben Thomson, LawFuel contributing editor The litigation talent-bleed at Paul Weiss has not stopped, but has merely broadened its practice focus. Two more senior partners are heading for the exits, adding to a rolling series of departures that has turned

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Panel Games: Revolut’s New Legal Model is a Quarterly Hunger Games for Big Law

Headlining, Law Firm Technology, Law Firms / May 22, 2026

If you’re a partner at a Magic Circle firm currently leaning back in your Herman Miller chair, comforted by the warmth of a three-year panel appointment, you might want to sit up. The fintech disruptor that refuses to play by the rules is, predictably, about to break yours.

Revolut, the neobank recently valued at a staggering $45 billion following a secondary share sale (with some internal projections whispering closer to $75 billion), is officially binning the traditional legal panel model. In its place comes “Revolut Partners,” a system designed to treat law firms less like venerable institutions and more like high-performance software vendors.
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The Partner Who Signed the Brief: Inside Morgan & Morgan’s $5,000 AI Lesson

Featured, Law Firms, Lawyers, Legal AI, US Law / May 21, 2026

If you wanted a single case to put on the cover of every CLE brochure for the next five years, Wadsworth v. Walmart Inc. would do nicely. A hoverboard explodes in a Wyoming family’s home. The family sues. Their lawyers — from America’s loudest plaintiffs’ firm, no less — file a motion in limine citing nine cases. Eight of them do not exist. They have never existed. They were, in the now-familiar verb of our age, hallucinated.

And so on 24 February 2025, U.S. District Judge Kelly H. Rankin handed down what is shaping up to be the defining American sanctions order of the generative-AI era. Rudwin Ayala — the Morgan & Morgan associate who actually fed the brief into the firm’s in-house AI tool, charmingly named MX2.law — lost his pro hac vice admission and was fined $3,000.

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The Phantom Raise: Why The 2026 BigLaw Scale Hasn’t Moved — And Which Firm Breaks First

Big Law Salary Scale, Featured, Law Firm Salary Scale, US Law / May 18, 2026

It is May 2026, and the BigLaw salary scale has not moved for two and a half years.

That sentence would have sounded unthinkable in 2021, when Milbank ignited a comp war that pushed first-year associates from $190,000 to $215,000 in eight weeks. Three years on, Class of 2025 first-years are starting on $225,000 — the same number Milbank put on the board in November 2023. Eighth-years are still on $435,000. Cravath confirmed in its November 18, 2025 bonus memo, in writing, that base salaries would not rise in 2026.

The lockstep is intact. The escalator has stopped.

So when does it start again, we ask – and presumably you want the answer to that so we’ve done our best to pose some on-the-button questions.

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How a Box of Hong Kong Cupcakes Triggered a $36m Law Partner Meltdown

Headlining, Law Firms, Power List / May 15, 2026

Quick question: “If a star rainmaker built ‘their’ office, do they get to secretly take it with them – or does the partnership own everything they touch?”

When the Australian Financial Review recently devoted a major feature to “the $36 million box of Hong Kong cupcakes”, it wasn’t really about baked goods – it was about how a high‑performing litigation boutique managed to blow itself up in plain sight.
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Quinn Emanuel’s John Quinn Steps Down — The Man Who Built a $2.8 Billion Litigation Empire

Featured, Law Firm Management, LawPreneur, LawStars, US Law / May 12, 2026

John B. Quinn, the Harvard-trained litigator who turned a scrappy four-lawyer Los Angeles firm into the world’s most feared litigation powerhouse, which also achieved ‘fearsome profits’, has stepped down from the helm of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan after four decades at the top.

The announcement was made to partners on Sunday and described by some in the legal press as arriving “abruptly”, bringing to a close one of the most remarkable leadership tenures in Big Law history.

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