Twenty Years On: What Clients Will Really Pay For?

Twenty years ago, all the cool kids had a BlackBerry. The handheld “phone-come-computer” was the ultimate in fast on-the-go communication. This was pretty impressive, given that email had really only been mainstream since the 1990s (just ten years earlier). Mass adoption of mobile phones started at around the same time. We can see this leap through the iconic series Friends, which was already on reruns by 2006. Landlines and recorded voice messages were a huge part of that show (remember the one where Rachel gets drunk and leaves Ross a voicemail confessing her feelings?).

Closer to home, let’s consider law firms. Twenty years ago, due diligence meant rooms full of boxes and an army of trainees. Signatures were all done by hand, and little pencil marks helpfully showed clients where to pop their wet signatures. Everyone worked in the office, and the large firms succeeded because they had people to throw at a problem.

Fast forward to today, 2026. Blackberries are obsolete, nobody has a landline anymore, and due diligence is all done online. Wet signatures? Really only left for niche or statutory requirements. We have replaced iPods with Spotify, and the office vs work from home debate has taken on a whole new meaning. We don’t use spider phones; we have Teams calls for that. Signatures are mainly electronic.

We can all be futurists

Futurists make good keynotes, don’t they? They get to tell us what will happen; they are rarely held to account, and they end with so many caveats and paths that they can never be wrong.

However, we can all be futurists. Looking ahead 20 years, it is possible to foresee that emails will no longer be the preferred method of communication. So much can get lost, and we are already drowning under the weight of it. Many businesses have turned to chat or messaging platforms, and something more integrated and seamless is bound to come along and replace them.

Due diligence will have moved on. AI will do most of those tasks. Biometrics will likely replace e-signatures, and wet signatures will be a thing of the past.

Time, efficiency, impact

All of this leads to a bit of a dilemma. What will clients be paying for when many professional services models have been built on time, with lawyers being the worst culprits. In a model built on time, more time equals more money. I have long said that this model doesn’t value efficiency. However, lawyers don’t get to choose whether clients want efficiency or impact. Clients get to choose.

As someone who spends a lot of time speaking to clients, what they want now is:

• Responsiveness. This is something that technology will be able to help with by reducing lag, improving visibility and enabling faster decision making

• Commercial advice. Again, this is something that technology can help with by cutting through the legal jargon and providing answers and summaries

• Someone who understands them. Again, arguably, technology can help here too if it is used thoughtfully and contextually

They want all of that wrapped up in someone they can get along with, a recognition that they will need to spend time with them.

In-house legal teams are being driven to be more and more efficient. They are already thinking about how to deal with disgruntled clients turning to AI to complain. They have to be thinking like AI and using it to check what their new opponents will come back with. Private practice is increasingly expensive, but the recognition that they do come with PI insurance is a sweetener.

But that trust thing

When I forced my audience at Legal Geek to think about what clients will value in 20 years, this is what they came up with.

Nothing inherently wrong here, you might say. The two words that jump out: Trust and Peace of Mind. These are things on which lawyers market themselves now. The recent Pinsent Mason case is an example of how AI, being driven by someone without the relevant level of judgement, can erode trust. However, the same can happen when an associate without the relevant level of judgment makes a mistake without AI. AI will improve. Outputs will improve. Trust in technology will grow. With that, there will be peace of mind. Peace of mind might also come from something else that appears on that slide, PI insurance.

Do law firms really just want to be insurance companies?

Assuming the answer to this is no, then lawyers do need to examine where the value lies. We would argue that it comes from that which is uniquely human. Empathy. The ability to say no (AI is almost always agreeable). Judgement. Curiosity. The ability to sit with ambiguity and still move things forward.

These skills are there. They may just need to show up in a slightly different way. They need to be built now, not just in 20 years.

What comes next?

This is where it gets interesting. If the future is less about time and more about what is uniquely human, then the question becomes not what lawyers do, but how they show up. In Part 2, I’ll explore what those human skills really look like in practice, and how law firms can start building them. If you’d like to make sure you don’t miss it, sign up for our newsletter here.