Sonia Hickey

Sonia Hickey is a freelance writer, magazine journalist, and owner of 'Woman with Words'. She has a strong interest in social justice and is a member of the Sydney Criminal Lawyers® content team. Sonia is the winner of the Mondaq Thought Leadership Awards, Spring 2022.

Lawyers Are Training AI to Do the Work They Used to Hate . . And It’s Working

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Legal AI companies are making a blunt pitch for law firm associates to escape the all-nighters, the non-billable document slog, and the mind-numbing reviews and to help build the technology that makes those tedious tasks disappear. Dozens are taking the offer, leaving Big Law for a hybrid role called “legal engineer”a description that is part

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Burnham’s Legal Purge Sees Lammy and Hermer Shown the Door

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Sonia Hickey Andy Burnham wasted little time putting his own stamp on government, and the legal establishment was among the first casualties. Within hours of entering Downing Street, the new prime minister swept aside some of the most recognisable legal figures of the Starmer years, with Deputy Prime Minister and Justice Secretary David Lammy (pictured)

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Why Law Firm Growth Now Depends on Better Data, Not Just Referrals

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Data analysis

Article source: Wzyer Staffing Referrals built the legal industry, but they can no longer carry its growth alone. Firms that rely only on word of mouth are losing ground to competitors who use data to find clients before a referral even happens. Treating data as optional is now a costly mistake. This article explains why

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From Sorbonne to the Riviera: The Young Lawyer Building a Modern Practice in Monaco

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Monaco’s New Legal Generation – Inside Maeva Zampori’s Unusual Life at the Bar Sonia Hickey Monaco is a place of contradictions. It is smaller than New York’s Central Park, yet hosts some of the world’s wealthiest residents. Ferraris idle beside fishing boats. Billionaires and baristas share the same narrow streets. And somewhere between the superyachts

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How Trump Turned Big Law Lobbying Into A Billion‑Dollar Profit Engine

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Lobbying

When Donald Trump turned Washington into a rolling policy experiment, most law firms braced for chaos, but a handful quietly built something else: – a brand new profit engine. Lobbying and government‑relations work, once treated as a sideline for politically connected partners, has become one of Big Law’s fastest‑growing business and a new career path for lawyers from DC to Westminster

The Trump‑Era Shock

For decades, lobbying has sat on the fringes of large law firms and what they traditionally do. There were always a few partners with good contacts, intermittent mandates, and work that was important but they were rarely central to the firm’s story and what the firm really ‘did’.
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The KC Who Built the Case Against Men in Women’s Sport

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The sports lawyer nobody sends a thank-you card Every era of sport gets the villain it deserves, and for a decade of gender-eligibility wars the casting has barely changed: a softly-spoken commercial litigator in a London office who keeps winning. His name is Jonathan Taylor KC, he is a partner at Bird & Bird, and

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Axinn’s Boutique Offers $25,000 Bonuses While BigLaw Plays Catch-Up

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Axinn

BigLaw Pay vs Boutique Pay Scale Sonia Hickey The boutiques are once again teaching BigLaw a lesson in how to spend money on associates with New York boutique Axinn Veltrop & Harkrider, a New York-founded antitrust and litigation shop, is dishing out special bonuses of $10,000 to $25,000, payable by 15 July, per a 23

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Bar Prep Meets GenAI

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BARBRI Swallows Startup ‘Lega’ To Teach Lawyers How To Talk To Robots Sonia Hickey “AI fluency” is now part of joining the bar before lawyers are let loose on the billable hour. BARBRI. The bar prep behemoth that still haunts your stress dreams has just acquired Lega, a generative AI platform founded by legal tech

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The ‘Year Zero’ Pivot That Tripled This Law Firm’s Revenue

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Matthew olliers

Changing the traditional law firm model is generating a lot of talk these days, but what can change for law firms when they seriously alter the model can turn a moribund operation into something like a high-growth startup. All of which is what happened with Olliers Solicitors in the UK, which went from £2m to a massive £6.5m in annual fee income.

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The Magic Circle Just Got Replaced. Four Of The New Five Are American

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Sonia Hickey, LawFuel contributing editor Anyone tracking the London legal market has watched this coming for three years. On 15 June 2026, Paul Hodkinson at Law.com International (left) was the first to put it on the record. London’s Magic Circle, he wrote, now consists of Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Paul Weiss, Simpson Thacher

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