EP #47: Innovation and Growth in the UK Legal Market with Neville Eisenberg

The Future Is Bright Podcast

“It is still quite challenging to convince partners of the need for change when the traditional model is still serving them incredibly well,” says Neville Eisenberg, Senior Strategy Executive, Mishcon de Reya, who joins The Future is Bright to talk about innovation taking place within UK law firms, innovation he helped contribute to with the contract attorney company, Lawyers on Demand, and now with Flex Legal, an alternative legal services provider now owned by Mishcon de Reya. Neville will discuss with hosts Chris Batz and Howard Rosenberg the growing number of opportunities in the alternative legal services provider market and what it means for private equity.

He'll discuss the changes which have taken place in the UK legal landscape as a result of deregulation and a number of legal processes now available in a self-service capacity, and what this means in terms of social justice. He will discuss the widely differing implications of AI on Top 10 law firms and on everyone below them, and the disconnect between supply and demand that he finds most concerning.

Learn Neville's thoughts on the crop of small high-performing law boutiques burgeoning in the UK and the importance of U.S. competition to the UK market.

Quotes

• “It is still quite challenging to convince partners of the need for change, or indeed the value of spending money on doing things differently when the traditional model is still serving them incredibly well.” (11:40 | Neville Eisenberg)

• “The Top Ten law firms in the UK generally regard Gen AI as likely to have a positive impact on their firms, in particular, because they see opportunity for productivity gains. But the rest of the Top 100, so the 90 firms below the top ten, have exactly the opposite, almost exactly, the opposite view of the impact of Gen AI in that they have significant concerns about the pressure that it might produce from clients to reduce cost of legal services and also that there may be a reduction in some of the work that’s outsourced to their firms.” (12:27 | Neville Eisenberg)

• “Notwithstanding the deregulation, there is still—it appears to me from my conversation with clients—there is still a disconnect between the demand side and the supply side in the market.” (20:15 | Neville Eisenberg)

• “One doesn’t have to be in a huge law firm to be successful. There is another model that can work.” (30:20 | Neville Eisenberg)

• “It just seems to me that there is a very strong business case for many of these firms creating shared business services platforms that can benefit from scale economies, and all the other benefits of scale, and running those business services functions in a more effective way.” (32:51 | Neville Eisenberg)

Links

Connect with Neville Eisenberg:

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neville-eisenberg-47b2586/

Connect with Howard Rosenberg:

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hrosenberg/

Company web profile: https://www.baretzbrunelle.com/howard-rosenberg

Connect with Chris Batz:

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbatz/

LinkedIn Company page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/columbus-street/

Columbus Street website: https://www.columbus-street.com/

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm