LPM, pricing and related functions in law firms – a thought experiment
Graeme Johnston / 4 December 2025 Originally published on LinkedIn Many large and even medium law firms have created specialist roles in legal project management, pricing, process improvement and data. I’ve been thinking about how I would ideally organise this topic if leading such a firm, assuming that it does mainly complex, not-easily-predictable, fairly large […]
A possible grand bargain between law firms and corporate clients – Part 1 of 3
Part 1: The existing landscape Elizabeth (Libbie) Evans and Graeme Johnston / 12 November 2025 Originally published on LinkedIn In recent months, the two of us have been discussing the entrenched problems of Continuing pressures on corporate legal departments to reduce legal spend and improve its predictability, but also on law firm partners to maintain or increase […]
Beyond the zero sum game in buying and selling legal services
Graeme Johnston, Molly MacGregor and Eric Eck / 8 August 2024 Perhaps the most important rule in management is, ‘Get the incentives right.’ Charlie Munger, American investment manager Businesses’ efforts to control spend on legal services have seen many developments over the last fifty years. Many things have been tried. But law firms have, […]
Juralio announces partnership with Guirbaden to boost continental European expansion and strategic go-to-market
Scotland, 28th May 2024 Juralio Technology Ltd, developer of Juralio, the joined-up legal work and budgeting platform, is pleased to announce a partnership with Guirbaden, a recognised expert in professional services in Europe. Through this collaboration, Juralio and Guirbaden will combine highly relevant software with extensive experience of both parties in professional services: ● Product […]
Legal work pricing taxonomy – 2nd draft
Graeme Johnston / 21 April 2024 Nine months ago, I published a first draft taxonomy of legal work pricing types. This is a second draft taking into account some comments and thoughts since then. As before, it’s intended to be a draft – comments welcome. Two design principles are: (1) simple practicality There are just five types. Each types is conceptualised as […]
In the weeds: on the over-optimisation of ebilling in legal work
Graeme Johnston / 20 April 2024 Strengths of an effective lawyer can include Achieving desired results despite rules which make this challenging Attention to detail Opinions on the right and wrong way to do things Facility with language Finding angles when advocating and negotiating A sense for pressure points and opportunities Weaknesses can sometimes include […]
What drives better value for money in legal services?
Graeme Johnston / 1 November 2023 Let’s start with an example of another complex problem with multiple, debatable causes. Western European countries have radically lower road traffic fatalities than the United States. And the gap has widened in recent years. Why is that? There’s clearly no single cause. Let’s take just three factors, which I’ll […]
Legal services downturn: survival or progress?
Graeme Johnston / 20 October 2023 In periods of reduced demand for transactional and financing work, the playbook for major law firms typically includes two main strategies reducing cost (mainly staffing) and ‘managing the equity’ (reducing partner numbers, or the share of some partners) targeting more of the kind of legal work that arises from […]
Addressing process fragility in legal work
Graeme Johnston / 10 October 2023 In this piece, I’m going to discuss fragile, robust and antifragile approaches to the process – as opposed to the substance and documents – of legal work why it’s worth paying attention to a realistic way to achieve robustness and antifragility more systematically within an organisation, rather than it […]
What Juralio does, who it helps and how
Graeme Johnston / 28 September 2023 We have an important release approaching in November, so it seems a good time for a fresh summing up of what Juralio does, and who and how it helps. For those who want further detail (this is the legal sector after all!), there’s a postscript – sections 4 and […]