More on LawFuel
- Is This The Billable Hour’s Last Stand? Anthropic’s Top Lawyer Thinks So
The legal profession has survived recessions, regulatory upheavals and the occasional partner meltdown. But the next threat to BigLaw’s favourite revenue model may come from something far less dramatic. A machine that reads faster than any associate and which could spell the end of the infamous ‘billable hour’, which has been touted as being in its end time for some time. According to Jeff Bleich, general counsel at AI company Anthropic, (pictured) the traditional billable hour could soon be on borrowed time. - DLA Piper Makes A Big Bet By Ditching the Verein for a Single Global Profit Pool
For years, the Swiss verein has been BigLaw’s favourite legal fiction as a neat way for sprawling… Read more: DLA Piper Makes A Big Bet By Ditching the Verein for a Single Global Profit Pool - Billable Hours vs. Billion‑Dollar Bots – Legora and the New Economics of Law
A two‑year‑old Swedish startup has just become one of the most valuable legal tech businesses on the planet—and it is using that war chest to plant its flag squarely in the US legal market. Legora’s $550 million Series D at a $5.55 billion valuation is not just another exuberant AI round; it is a blunt message to law firm leaders that the window for treating AI as a side project has closed. Legora’s pitch is disarmingly simple. Built on top of large language models, its platform targets the work that eats most of a junior lawyer’s life: research, document review, contract drafting and due diligence. The company claims tens of thousands of legal professionals using the product daily, across some 800 customers in more than 50 markets, including heavy‑hitting firms like Bird & Bird, Cleary Gottlieb, White & Case, Linklaters, Goodwin, Dentons and advisers such as Deloitte. - Big Law’s Trump Reprieve Lasts Less Than 24 Hours — The U-Turn That Changed Everything
It has been a year — twelve months of watching the most powerful law firms on the planet twist in the wind at the pleasure of a sitting president. And just when it looked like the drama had finally resolved itself, Washington reminded everyone that in this administration, nothing is ever quite over. On Monday, the Trump administration quietly announced it was abandoning its executive orders against Jenner & Block, Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey — four firms that had the nerve, and the litigation chops, to fight back. All four had beaten the orders in the lower courts. - Is This The Death of Lockstep Pay for BigLaw?
For decades, BigLaw partnership compensation had the reassuring predictability of a Swiss watch. Progress through lockstep. Accumulate seniority. Collect your reward. Repeat. That model isn’t dead. But the announcement in February 2026 that Freshfields, the world’s 13th largest firm by gross revenue, and an institution that maintained an all-equity partnership for its entire existence, was introducing a nonequity partner tier while simultaneously stretching its lockstep to reward higher earners at the top of the pay scale, made something abundantly clear. The Pay Reset is Now Freshfields isn’t alone. Cravath created a salaried partner tier in November 2023, and that move gave other highly-ranked firms permission to follow suit — Paul Weiss, WilmerHale, Cleary, Skadden, Debevoise, and Sullivan & Cromwell have all introduced nonequity tiers in the two years since.
