Featured – Page 4

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

Featured, Law Firms, Lawyers, Power Briefs, UK Law / June 22, 2026

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

Featured, Law Firms, UK Law / June 20, 2026

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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New Women in Law Report Shows ‘Pressure Points’ Warns of Unsustainable Work and Exit Risk

Briefings, Featured, Law Firms, UK Law / June 19, 2026

Half of women working in legal services say their current working pattern is unsustainable for their long‑term health, and 67% have considered changing jobs or taking a career break because of wellbeing concerns. For a profession obsessed with retention and reputation, that is less a wellbeing problem and more a pipeline crisis. The new Pressure Points:

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The Rise of Justin Smith – How a Missouri Boutique Cornered the Federal Judiciary

Briefings, Featured, LawStars, Lawyers, US Law / June 18, 2026

Tom Borman, LawFuel contributing editor The confirmation of Justin Smith to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit is a major moment in Donald Trump’s second‑term judicial strategy. The Senate voted along party lines to hand Smith a lifetime seat on a key federal appeals court that covers seven states. To much

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The AI Question BigLaw Doesn’t Want Junior Lawyers Asking

Featured, Law Firms, Law Job News, Legal AI / June 14, 2026

Generative AI has arrived inside BigLaw carrying a question that no one is quite ready to answer out loud: if the technology can do what junior associates do, what exactly are junior associates for? It is the most uncomfortable conversation in the legal profession right now and it is only getting louder from what we

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SpaceX’s $75 Billion Liftoff – Meet the Lawyers Steering History’s Biggest IPO

Featured, Law Firms, Power Firms, Power Law Firms - Global, US Law / June 13, 2026

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher is steering SpaceX through what has become the largest stock market debut ever, while Davis Polk & Wardwell is guiding the underwriting banks led by Goldman Sachs. Reports from Bloomberg indicate that SpaceX has committed to $25.5 million in legal costs in its amended S-1 — a figure that dwarfs the typical IPO legal spend, though it’s broadly in line with what other mega-deals have paid out.

For context, the largest US IPO of 2025, Medline’s $6.3 billion listing advised by Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, generated $25.2 million in legal fees and expenses, while Cerebras Systems’ $5.5 billion IPO, handled by Latham & Watkins, racked up $4.1 million.

SpaceX’s number sits almost exactly where Medline landed except SpaceX is aiming for a deal roughly twelve times the size.

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Big Law Pay Rates – The Resentful Middle Tier: QE’s £189k Move Is Squeezing London’s Senior Associates

Big Law Salary Scale, Featured, UK Law / June 12, 2026

London Law’s Senior Associate Problem No One Wants to Talk About Fresh from Quinn Emanuel joining the fray in London, as we reported last week, the latest 5% across-the-board hike has pushed newly qualified lawyers to £189,000 from 1 July, with the scale running up to £373,000 for the most experienced associates. That puts QE

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Above the Law 2026 Rankings: Chicago Tops an Outcomes‑First Law School Table

Featured, Law Schools, Power Briefs / June 11, 2026

Inside Above the Law’s 2026 Law School Rankings If U.S. News still rules the prestige conversation, Above the Law’s newly released 2026 Top Law Schools list is doubling down on a different question – that is, what actually happens after graduation. Its rankings are unapologetically built around post‑JD outcomes—who gets real legal jobs that pay

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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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Colorado’s AI Act Is Dead. Long Live Colorado’s AI Act.

Featured, Law Firm Management, Power Briefs, US Law / June 9, 2026

It was supposed to be the most consequential AI regulation in the United States. Two years of political battles, two deadline delays, a federal court injunction, a lawsuit from Elon Musk, and an intervention by the Department of Justice later , Colorado’s landmark AI Act has been repealed, replaced and is now scheduled to take effect January 1, 2027.

If you blinked, you missed most of it. But if you’re advising clients who use AI to make decisions affecting employees, customers, or borrowers, you cannot afford to blink again.

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