Navigating the evolving landscape of law firms

Originally published in Briefing September

As the legal sector undergoes unprecedented transformation, Peppermint’s head of product Sarah Kemp shares her views on how technology can help firms identify opportunities among the challenges they face

The legal sector is undergoing a transformative period. Leading analysts at PwC forecast a buoyant UK legal sector in FY2025, and we’ve seen this recently as law firms announce growth and share positivity for the year ahead.

At the same time however, they warn of challenges awaiting these firms — with market forces driving an ever-deepening competition for talent, increasing demands for efficiency, challenging competitive pressures and rising client expectations. This shift is not only reshaping client-lawyer interactions but also compelling firms to rethink their operational strategies to stay relevant and competitive.

So, how can technology help firms identify opportunities among these challenges?

The rush for AI adoption

The one industry trend everyone is talking about right now, of course, is artificial intelligence (AI). It’s hard to think of a sector that won’t be touched and transformed by AI over the coming years. I’m personally really excited to be in a position to shape what the world of legal software will look like today, tomorrow, and in 2030. Buckle up — we’re in for one heck of a ride!

Grounding your tools in your data is the starting point for your firm’s AI adoption journey. This personalises the knowledge and insights that AI reveals at a foundational level, setting the stage to maximise its return for your user community.

With our team’s unwavering passion to stay ahead of the curve, we’re determined to keep ourselves in the engine room of the AI train. We’ve offered predictive analysis and document reader capabilities for some time. Our AI-infused enterprise relationship management (ERM) solution, launched in April 2024, has gone from strength to strength in the hands of our clients. Currently, we’re focused on continuing to mature our legal-ready generative AI (genAI) assistant LARA, and would welcome a conversation with any firm interested in this area.

Rising costs and the ever-deepening competition for talent

The expectations of new generations of talent are always evolving. Traditional pull factors like salary have been outpaced for some time by demands for work-life balance and a desire to work with modern tools.

When you build solutions focusing on user experience, you create a genuine product to better someone’s job. We focus on providing lawyers with a tailored starting point for their day, connecting them to all their critical information and all their tools in one place, while reaching them in the places where they’re already working like Outlook and Teams. This provides a modern working experience they love!

And while you can never replace the intangible value of the watercooler chat, or the embedding of a firm’s culture through the office experience, remote working as a key aspect of work-life-balance is here to stay. Our mission is to ensure that we offer working experiences that help firms to offer remote working securely, on any authorised device, at any time. This is an expectation, but as a pioneer of cloud technology in the legal sector, we’ve got the knowledge and experience to deliver.

The growing focus on rates realisation

All around us, complementary professional services markets are shifting towards outcomes-based billing models. Law firms are also shifting in this direction with the aim of enhancing satisfaction loyalty and overall business performance. Consumption-based pricing models — aka the billable hour — aren’t going anywhere, though, and will remain a key component of the commercial mix.

So, what role can technology play? Rates realisation can be a tough nut to crack. We offer a safety net to capture time as part of daily routines, which can then contribute towards billing or simply capture effort to help tune fixed-price engagements. Beyond that, we embed the ability to capture time within the places where lawyers already work, to ensure that they are never more than a click away from being able to record their time.

And what’s next? AI! Our research and innovation team are prototyping enhancing time capture with AI. We see significant opportunities to use AI to extend our safety net — for example, to analyse a lawyer’s diary and make recommendations on where more time could be recorded. In conjunction, we see an opportunity using genAI to auto-populate time entry narratives to help articulate the value of that time to clients.

The surge in client expectations

Client appetites for consuming services 24/7, at their convenience, doesn’t exclude the legal sector. Whether corporate or consumer, clients’ expectations are increasingly being set by their experiences using Amazon or their bank’s app. Akin to the modern retail experience, clients now seek a user-centric approach, highlighting the importance of adaptability and responsiveness in interactions and an increased focus on delivering greater value, transparency and improved communication.

At Peppermint, we obsess over not only our clients’ requirements but also their clients’ needs. Client portals have been a particular focus area because they underpin today’s expectations for a modern experience while consuming a firm’s services. This spans from simply communicating with your lawyer, to sharing documentation, completing client actions, procuring new services from your firm, and consuming real-time reporting on your firm’s performance against KPIs.

Getting ahead of the challenges

You cannot create something without being passionate — and we are a passionate team dedicated to delivering collaborative and value-driven solutions exclusively for the legal industry. We welcome any opportunity to engage with firms to share ideas and discuss solutions.

To find out more, please contact our sales director, Chris Jefferson.