{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"<iframe src=\"https://embed.acast.com/$/690212f54013c81f9af07e68/6a168c4a6ee822cbfb45db3a?\" frameBorder=\"0\" width=\"700\" height=\"250\"></iframe>","title":"Frans Post - The end of the pyramid, the billable hour, and why nobody is talking about it","description":"<p>Recorded at the Legal Geek Conference in Amsterdam, this episode takes on the question that most law firms are quietly avoiding: what happens to the business model when AI takes over the work that juniors used to do? Frans is a legal management consultant and former Clifford Chance professional who advises law firms on strategy, pricing, and operating models. He has spent twenty years thinking about how legal services are produced and sold, long before AI made the conversation urgent.</p><p><br></p><p>In conversation with Hidde Bruinsma, Frans lays out why the traditional law firm pyramid is under existential pressure, and why almost nobody in the profession is willing to say it out loud:</p><ul><li>Why the bottom of the pyramid, trainees and junior associates, will be the first to go, and what that means for firms that have built their entire economics around billing a thousand hours per junior per year</li><li>The math that nobody wants to hear: clients are paying roughly 250,000 euros a year for someone straight out of university, and Frans asks plainly why any client would keep doing that</li><li>Why the billable hour is not a measure of value but a calculation trick designed to guarantee partner income, and why even so-called \"fixed fees\" are just the same hours repackaged</li><li>How Clifford Chance was already experimenting with annual retainers and product-based billing twenty years ago, models that most firms are only now beginning to consider</li><li>The story of a law firm that started charging clients for document storage by the byte, and the partner who said \"that's not us\" until it worked and turned into free money</li><li>Why KPMG once walked into a law firm and announced a technology surcharge on their audit fees, and what that tells you about how other industries think about pricing</li><li>How young lawyers are already asking firms in interviews how much they use AI, and walking away from firms that don't have an answer</li><li>Why law firms never needed marketers, strategists, or business developers, the partner model was self-sustaining for thirty years and why that's now becoming a vulnerability</li><li>The question Frans puts to every firm he works with: why does a client come to you? Not because of your AI, but because of who you are and the example of Arne Grimme at De Brauw, who clients seek out for reasons that have nothing to do with technology</li><li>Frans' closing advice: take a day off, sit back, and seriously think about what happens when 40% of your work can be done by a machine. That question, he says, is where it all starts</li></ul><p><br></p><p>Frans offers a blunt, experience-backed perspective on why the legal profession's business model is more fragile than it appears and why the firms that start rethinking now will be the ones still standing when the volume shift hits.</p>","author_name":"Recht in je Oor"}