This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Keith Maziarek, founder of Lucratic Method and Bodhi Solutions, about the shifting economics of legal work, AI’s impact on pricing, and why law firms and clients need better commercial conversations. Keith brings more than two decades of experience in pricing, profitability, legal project management, and business-of-law strategy from firms including DLA Piper, Perkins Coie, and Katten. His new consulting work focuses on aligning client value with law firm operations, a topic gaining urgency as AI changes how legal work gets produced, measured, and priced.
Keith argues the legal industry has spent too much time asking what technology firms use, while ignoring how economic models, client expectations, and service delivery structures support the work. For him, the problem is less about whether BigLaw is broken and more about both firms and clients being “tone deaf” to each other’s business realities. Firms talk about realization rates. Clients talk about cutting spend. The better conversation starts with mutual value, risk, predictability, staffing, and clarity around which work deserves premium treatment and which work should be systematized.
The discussion turns directly to generative AI and the mistaken assumption that faster work must always mean cheaper work. Keith makes an important distinction between routine, high-volume work and complex, high-stakes legal matters. AI will reduce variance and improve budget predictability in many workflows, especially where tasks are repeatable and pattern-based. But in complex work, AI’s greater value might come from better preparation, broader analysis, and stronger outcomes, rather than dramatic cost reduction. The Neil Katyal Supreme Court preparation example gives this point a useful frame. AI might not reduce time, but it might improve judgment.
Keith also explores how AI will reshape law firm staffing and leverage. Fewer junior associates might be needed for some traditional tasks, but firms will need more data professionals, technologists, process experts, and other allied professionals to make AI-driven work reliable. This raises hard questions about associate development, talent pipelines, compensation, and the future shape of the partnership model. The old pyramid might narrow into something closer to a specialized team, with carefully selected lawyers and business professionals working together around data, process, and client value.
The episode closes with Keith’s view of the next phase of legal transformation. Firms are still experimenting, but the experimental period will give way to sharper questions about revenue models, profitability, AI-enabled service delivery, and whether certain work belongs inside the firm, with an ALSP, or in a hybrid model. His crystal ball points toward a market where firms with mature commercial thinking gain ground, while firms slow to rethink pricing, staffing, and process risk falling behind. As Keith suggests throughout the conversation, the future of legal work is not only about smarter tools. It is about whether firms learn to run better businesses.
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[Special Thanks to Legal Technology Hub for their sponsoring this episode.]
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
Transcript:
Greg Lambert (00:00)
Hey everyone, I’m Greg Lambert with The Geek in Review, and I’m here with Nikki Shaver from Legal Technology Hub. Nikki, I understand you’re expanding some of your advisory services. Do you want to give us some insight on that?
Nikki Shaver (00:12)
We are indeed, Greg. Thank you for having me. We at Legal Tech Hub are aware of all of the complexity being faced by law firms and corporate legal departments at the moment. It’s an environment where people have been overloaded. We hear a lot about burnout. People are trying to add to their teams, but sometimes there’s too much to do and you need some support.
What we find often is that an external perspective can be really helpful. For example, in law firms, sometimes you might be in that moment where you’re trying to drive adoption of your AI initiatives, your AI tools that you’ve licensed, and it’s not going particularly well, and it can be hard to determine exactly why. We at Legal Tech Hub now have advisory services that allow us to come in, interview enough of your people to get a real sense of what the enablers are in your environment for AI adoption, but also what the obstacles are.
Having an understanding of that from the outside then allows you to address certain cultural elements internally that you might not ever have considered relevant to driving adoption of technology or encouraging people to work in new ways or developing a culture around change and embracing openness to new ways of working.
So that’s one of the advisory services we offer. We can also work with firms around broader AI strategy, developing AI policy. We run full technology selection projects. We can support fractional KM and innovation efforts and a number of other elements internally. So if you have a need internally for some external support, advisory services, don’t forget that Legal Tech Hub is one of the providers out there.
And you can always find us at legaltechnologyhub.com. Feel free to reach out and find out more if you’re interested.
Marlene Gebauer (02:17)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
Greg Lambert (02:24)
And I’m Greg Lambert. Marlene, over the past few years, the legal industry has been obsessed with what I’m calling the what of technology. It’s like, what tool are you using? What platform are you on? What LLM model are you using?
Marlene Gebauer (02:40)
I know. I know. It’s a lot of hype, and as that settles, we find out the what doesn’t matter if the how is broken. Specifically, how do the economics of a firm support this work, and how do we align what we build with the value we prove? It’s a huge topic right now.
Greg Lambert (03:02)
Well, in order to handle that topic, I think we brought on the perfect person to help us walk through that. He’s a veteran of the business of law who spent 25 years building the system, so he must have started when he was 12. He’s been at some of the world’s most elite firms, including DLA Piper, Perkins Coie, Katten, and now he’s struck out on his own.
Marlene Gebauer (03:08)
Exactly.
Yeah. So, Keith Maziarek recently set out on his own to launch Lucratic Method, a consulting firm that applies management science and market economics to professional services.
Greg Lambert (03:38)
So, Keith, welcome to The Geek in Review. Good to have you.
Keith Maziarek (03:40)
It’s my cue. Thank you. Hey, I have to start out by saying how honored and privileged I feel to be invited on this. I feel like a crazy fan right now. I’ve heard you guys. I’ve been listening to you forever, and I’m actually here. I can’t believe it. So thank you for having me. I was just going to say I’ll try not to step afoul of what you would consider too much. I don’t want to make you regret inviting me, but thank you so much.
Greg Lambert (03:58)
We’ll see how you feel in 30 minutes.
Keith Maziarek (04:08)
So yeah, as you mentioned in the intro, I’ve spent the last 25 years in law firms or in the legal industry, the last 21 in law firms, and the last 17 building pricing, profitability, LPM, and related functions in some of those illustrious firms. I did it for a while. I was at DLA for 10 years, Perkins for two years, and then Katten for eight years. Over that timeline, as you can imagine, after a while you start going, you know what, I feel like I want to start branching out and doing some different things.
The day to day was becoming pretty predictable for me. Not trying to say that I’m the best at everything by any means, but I kind of knew a lot of the normal territory I was coming across. I started thinking about what would be exciting and enriching and engaging for a next chapter. I thought for a while about going into independent consulting. I thought about it before I joined Katten, but then that was a really enticing opportunity. So I took it. Fast forward eight more years, and when I was starting to think of what’s next, that became another attractive option for me.
Greg Lambert (05:16)
I do have to say that when I read Lucratic Method, of course, all I could see was lucrative method. Is it? Okay.
Keith Maziarek (05:24)
Lucratic Method? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You said lucrative, but that’s the base word that I got it from, yeah, obviously.
Marlene Gebauer (05:29)
Did I say lucrative? No, I said Lucratic. I did? Oh, sorry.
Greg Lambert (05:32)
But I don’t know. Maybe people can read it that way, lucrative instead of Lucratic.
Marlene Gebauer (05:35)
Lucratic.
Keith Maziarek (05:38)
Well, I was trying to play off of, because most of my focus has been in legal and the lawyers learn the Socratic Method. I teach the Lucratic Method of how to have a prosperous business, not necessarily the substantive practice of law sort of thing. So anyway, I was wondering, I don’t know if people are going to get this or go, what the hell does that mean? And more people than I had expected have complimented me and said, that’s kind of clever. So I’m like, good, at least I didn’t go a little too abstract where nobody was picking up on what I was trying to get out there.
Greg Lambert (05:46)
Yeah.
Keith Maziarek (06:08)
So yeah, so there’s that. Then also, simultaneously, I have launched a pricing and rates management platform that is something that, throughout my years working in law firms, is one of the needs that isn’t really met in a comprehensive way by any existing tools out there. It was kind of an opportunity, a gap in the market.
So again, looking at what I thought would be interesting to take as a next direction or chapter in my career, I’ve been really lucky to know a lot of people. You guys obviously are great examples of that across the industry. It made me think, you know, I’m fortunate to have my eyes open to a lot of different dimensions of the industry. I thought about it, and I’m like, I remember this is the last thing I’ll say and then we can move on. I’m sorry.
There’s a partner I worked with for many years at DLA who I haven’t said this publicly, but his name is David Mendelson, and he was a very, very talented client relationship guy. He knew a lot of different people. He built really strong relationships. I used to work with him a lot. I remember one time I was sitting in his office and he goes, you know, I’ll be remiss if I spend the rest of my career just billing my time for doing insurance work. He’s like, I enjoy what I do, and it’s great. And I enjoy the people I work with, but I keep being confronted by these other opportunities, ways to use that as a way to do broader swaths of things or have new adventures sort of within a realm that’s interesting to me, but it’s also comfortable and I’ve got a lot of connections.
Someday, I want to figure out how I can do that, because I’ll be remiss if I don’t take that opportunity. So I thought of his words as I was thinking about what I wanted to do. I’m like, oh, now I understand what he was talking about. So those were my drivers then. But anyway.
Marlene Gebauer (07:47)
Yeah, it’s kind of applying the relationships you build and how to do that and what you’ve learned, and having a broader platform to do that on. Yeah, absolutely.
Keith Maziarek (07:57)
Yeah, exactly. I get asked for advice a lot too. I get asked to speak at things all the time. And again, I’m very fortunate to publish. I’m fortunate for those things. But because of that, like I said, I tend to encounter more people or get to engage in a lot of conversations I wouldn’t get to if I didn’t have that ability to interact with so many great thinkers out there in the world. So yeah, I’m excited. It’s been an interesting journey.
Marlene Gebauer (08:21)
So on your website, you talk about creating harmony between client value and operational structures. I want to explore that a little bit because, is that suggesting Big Law is, you know, that model is inherently disharmonious? Or is it just not evolving as fast as the market is?
Keith Maziarek (08:44)
I would say, I don’t know if disharmonious is the right way. The way I think of it is tone deaf. I don’t know where that falls on a musical theory spectrum from disharmonious. In my experience, that applies to both law firms and clients because what I’ve seen happen over the years many times is you have these relationships that are supposed to be trusting business advisory, trusted advisor type relationships, but both sides talk past each other about things that matter to them and not what matters to the people they’re sitting across from.
In order to have a successful business relationship, it’s like personal relationships, there’s got to be give and take. When I’ve seen a lot of partners go into meetings with clients and say, well, my realization is really bad on this work, so we have to change the way we price things. And it’s like, your client doesn’t care about what your realization is. You’re talking about the wrong thing. You’re starting off on the wrong foot.
Marlene Gebauer (09:37)
To the wrong audience.
Keith Maziarek (09:39)
And conversely, on the client side, clients go, we need to save a lot of money. My CFO said some percentage or whatever. So we’re going to hold you flat or cut what you can charge us for this particular type of work. That also isn’t necessarily sustainable. Trying to find the collaborative ways of overcoming what some of those things are, where you can come away…
Marlene Gebauer (09:57)
Cheapest isn’t always the best.
Keith Maziarek (10:06)
It all sounds cliché, but there’s a lot of truth to it, a lot of relevance to it in a practical sense. Trying to look at how you create more mutually beneficial relationships within those commercial constructs is not simple, and it’s not something that a lot of lawyers are naturally good at doing. That’s why a lot of firms have growing and more sophisticated functions in these areas. Those are the things that I’ve been lucky to be able to explore over the years in these really great opportunities I’ve had.
That’s kind of the basis, and that spans a lot of things. I mentioned pricing a lot because that’s what I’ve been most closely and intensely involved in. But then you get into things related to staffing models and talking about profitability models and how do you productize certain services? How do you look at what the value proposition is and segmentation between different types of work? What are the market forces at play that are so often ignored by both sides, right?
So bringing those things in and trying to create a more holistic commercial basis for the relationships that clients and firms build, those are the principles that I’m bringing to, hopefully bringing to the table with the conversations I’m having with folks.
Greg Lambert (11:16)
I imagine that sometimes feels like beating your head against the wall, especially as people are talking past each other rather than to each other. So it’s good to have a referee in between there to make it a little bit more aligned.
So Keith, you mentioned earlier that you’ve had pretty good luck at, or kind of injected yourself in, doing some writing and doing podcasts and working with things like Legal Value Network. But you had written in The American Lawyer an article called Don’t Believe the Hype where you argue that the cost savings, especially around generative AI, will remain elusive, especially when it’s complex work. This feels kind of counterintuitive to what all of my vendors are telling me. What’s going to happen? They’re telling me it’s going to be like magic, and everything’s going to work out.
Marlene Gebauer (12:10)
And what all the clients are saying.
Greg Lambert (12:12)
So how do you talk to your clients, whether it’s law firms or in-house, and talk about this budgetary certainty, which I think is going to be more realistic than saying I need a lower bill, right?
Keith Maziarek (12:28)
Yeah, it’s such an evolving conversation based on maturity curve dynamics across so many things, tools, processes, the way that relationships are developing or whatever, different types of demand. It’s interesting. You have to stay tuned in order to stay up to date on it. It’s not like, okay, we’re there, here’s the answer.
But what I find interesting, the premise of that article was, over the years, I’ve always heard from clients, the three main priorities are cost savings, budgetary certainty, and risk sharing. So I think of a lot of things on the basis of a spectrum or a continuum. In particular, legal engagements over the years, there’s a distinction to be made between specific types of work or even workflows that fall more on the commodity side or the routine side and then those that fall more on the specialty side or complex or sophisticated side, right?
I think that’s an important distinction that is missed a lot in the sound bites, particularly from clients and also from the vendors that are feeding clients a lot of the sound bites that they’re using, that AI is a magic button and everything should be way cheaper now. It should be free because it’s so much quicker. That sweeps under the rug a lot of important dimensions of the conversation, like making the distinction between, if you’ve got a hangnail, you can easily commoditize that. That’s a simple problem. But if you need heart surgery, that’s not the same level of risk profile or complexity. So you shouldn’t assume the same results from plugging in the same process.
That’s an important piece that I think is often lost in those conversations. So if we think about on the commoditized side, I think it’s routine, pattern, high volume, those types of things, low complexity. There is probably a whole lot of money to be saved there in almost all instances, and by all means, clients and firms should be pursuing the most optimal ways to do that work. In general, they should be pursuing the most optimal ways to do all work, right?
When you start moving more toward the complex side or sophisticated side of that spectrum, to work that’s multiple workflows, multiple work streams, different dependencies that come through at different points in time when circumstances materialize and you have to make a decision at different forks in the road, that’s not really like a push-enter-and-you’re-going-to-get-the-answer-to-every-question-you’ve-ever-had-instantly situation. There’s a lot more that goes into it.
The distinction I was making there was, on that complex side, you can use AI to run a lot of the variance out of some of the component pieces of the work that would historically suffer from a lot more variance when done by humans because of lack of direction or lack of clarity or uncertainty on what the right path is. So you explore four at the same time, and it’s overly labor intensive to do that. You can do a lot of those things in a lot more abbreviated fashion, at least a couple initial steps of them, to help you determine what the next best step is on the path.
So what that means is those really high peaks and valleys of variance you would get from human work, those are going to be suppressed on the stuff that would be high volume and not necessarily high complexity stuff, right? So that’ll squeeze down with some of the other variances. If you think about what those top three priorities that I’ve always heard from clients are, the next one after cost savings being budgetary certainty, I’ve had a lot of instances where that was the primary one. Like, I just have to know what to put in the budget this year. It doesn’t have to be cheap, but it’s got to be right.
This is, I think, some of the hidden or forgotten or overlooked value that you can get out of AI. Instead of obsessing over, take a $3 million antitrust matter and make it $450,000 because AI, that’s a very short-sighted, unsophisticated way of looking at it. But if you can say, hey, I know this is a complex, high-stakes matter, what are the ways we dissect the component parts of that and streamline each of those where we can plug in a new tool or process that’s going to benefit and help things happen more quickly or help happen with less variance, less manual labor? That was the premise there. That does hold considerable value for a lot of corporates out there that are looking for, I understand that not everything is easy, but let’s run the next variable out of the equation of being the variance one.
Greg Lambert (16:38)
I think that kind of reminds me, I was watching a TED Talk this morning with Neal Katyal talking about his preparation for arguing in front of the Supreme Court. He was talking about using an AI tool to set up what he thought were the potential questions coming from each of the nine justices, and how almost every question that they asked, the AI had kind of predicted that they would ask.
I don’t think that saved him any time. It probably cost him more time, but he was better prepared. He had better outcomes because he was using tools in a way that really supported better outcomes for his client.
Keith Maziarek (17:24)
That’s a great example, because that’s one of the things I mentioned in the article too. Let’s not remain constrained by this is how it was done before and this was the outcome, so let’s do it a different way and it’s the same outcome. There are many great use case examples like that where, because of the breadth of information that can be pulled into different analyses you’re doing based on the prompts you use or whatever the question might be or whatever you’re trying to analyze, you might come up with, you can avail yourself of more potential solutions more easily or at all because you couldn’t do it the same way if you were doing all the work manually.
Using some of these tools because they do have that extra processing capacity that your brain doesn’t and time won’t allow, right? So that’s another thing that’s also lost. If you’re getting a better result, should it be a tenth of the cost that it used to be? I don’t understand why that’s necessarily the conclusion that is so often driving a lot of those conversations.
Marlene Gebauer (18:18)
Yeah. I mean, it sounds a lot like we had Lenny Nuara on the last episode, and he does, like, there’s a lot of intake that they do. They’re doing flat-fee M&A, and they do a lot of intake to, again, do that compression that you’re talking about to get all the information. So they’re not having to go through as much. They understand what the client is actually looking for in the deal. They’ve been able to transition something that’s very, very complex into something that they can basically predict, this is what the fee’s going to be, and make money off of that.
Keith Maziarek (18:50)
I think that’s one of the exciting things too that isn’t talked about as much as it will be, is the trigger effect that AI has on making people look more at data intake and what they’re not only collecting information, which is so often overlooked in historical legacy processes at firms. Like, just get the matter open. I want to start working. Collecting important information, I’m preaching to the converted here, but collecting information that’s got commercial or predictive value to it, making sure it’s clean, making sure it’s high quality, and making sure it’s accessible and able to be accessed and incorporated in a nimble way into different ways of looking at things. The value you can reap from that exercise, which has so long been overlooked, is, I think, more exaggerated now when you start laying different flavors of LLMs and AI over what that data can do.
Marlene Gebauer (19:47)
There’s more of an incentive to do it. Before it was, oh, the attorneys don’t want to do that. It’s going to take too long. And now it’s almost like, yeah, you kind of have to, because taking too long is not really allowed anymore.
Keith Maziarek (20:01)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Greg Lambert (20:02)
Yeah, because I think there’s a lot, and I’ve seen this as I’ve talked to attorneys at my firm, is there’s a big motivation to improve the turnaround time. It’s getting the results back into the hands of the client faster to make better decisions.
Attached to that, the other thing that I’m seeing is the attorneys who are comfortable talking about how they’re leveraging the AI are really having good conversations with their clients. It’s not the clients coming back going, oh great, now I’m only going to pay a tenth of what I was paying before. But what I’m really hearing, and it’s anecdotal, but it’s enough anecdotal that I feel like it’s a trend here, is a lot of times that spurs the conversation to going, oh my God, I’ve got this work that I’ve been doing that I don’t really want to do. I’d rather have you do it. But I’ve never thought that this would be something that would make sense for you to do. But if you can leverage the AI, I’m more than happy to give you this work.
Keith Maziarek (21:12)
Right, yeah. I think those conversations, I mean, I’ve said this since I look at the AI era now that’s continuing to unfold being similar in nature, having a lot of parallels with the AFA era that was like 2009 when I started doing this, where there was a lot of talk and a lot of uncertainty. I remember at the beginning when I started getting involved in this stuff, it was toward the beginning on the AFA side, and I was really nervous and anxious back then. Like, what if what I’m saying or what I’m doing is wrong?
And people call me out on that. Then I realized nobody really knows. It’s a period of exploration and discovery. You’re going to find what works and take what works and then leverage that with other things and incorporate that into other models. It’ll continue to evolve and improve from there. So I feel like it’s a similar thing here. I feel like that is coming out in a lot of conversations. A lot of the statements I would hear that were very frustrating to me, like the ones we talked about at the beginning, like, everything should be super cheap now because AI, I feel like the conversation is evolving and maturing on the client side now because more recent studies I’ve seen, they are actually using AI a lot more than I would have predicted.
I assumed they were going to go, I’m not paying for that. I want my law firms to pay for it and then use it, and they’re not charging me anything because they’re using it. It’s been interesting to me to see how wrong I was in some of the surveys coming out where in-house departments are leveraging it. But when you have that conversation with an in-house lawyer that is using it or within an environment where it’s much more present, those are so much more productive and fruitful conversations because there’s symmetry of information and understanding there. You’re not going, you don’t even understand the beginning of how this thing starts to work or what I have to do in order to get it to do anything. You’re seeing fast and equating that to free or cheap or whatever, right?
So I do think that the conversations and the familiarity are evolving and maturing at a faster pace than I would have expected. Thanks to clients actually using it, in other words. I didn’t think that was going to come about as quickly as it has.
So yeah, I think we’re on a good course. We have to keep going in the right direction.
Marlene Gebauer (23:22)
Yeah, I’m kind of interested in your thoughts. I mean, we’re talking a lot about workflows and whether agents are going to condense the time that is needed. But then at the same time, we’re talking about, you have to be checking things, you have to check results. Oftentimes, I don’t know about you, but oftentimes that takes longer than actually putting it together because you haven’t put it together. So your mind isn’t quite in the right spot in terms of, okay, I know it’s here. I know it’s here. You have to go searching for everything.
So when we’re talking about these new workflows and we’re talking about new staffing, for moving work from people on the higher end of the food chain to the lower end of the food chain, I guess, is it going to be shorter? Is it going to be more condensed? Is it going to take more time? Are expenses going to stay flat or are they really going to go down?
Keith Maziarek (24:25)
I think, and we’ll see if I’m wrong about this like I was about the client thing, but only time will tell, right? We’ll do it to be continued.
Marlene Gebauer (24:29)
We’ll come back in a year and ask.
Greg Lambert (24:30)
Luckily we have this recorded, so we can point back to it.
Keith Maziarek (24:36)
Exactly. I was going to say, yeah, now it’s memorialized. But I think what I’ve been telling people is, in order to deploy and leverage AI in productive, meaningful ways, whether it’s commodity work or components of more sophisticated work, it’s not easy to make it work well, right? There are a lot of things that go into that.
So to me, the staffing model evolves. It changes. I would assume, I haven’t talked to anybody yet, there are some interesting anecdotal data points I have recently, but most people agree that it would seem you would need less associate leverage in the future because of what AI can give you. What I believe will and is already starting to substitute for that leverage is other experts that are also highly skilled, highly educated, very important professionals like data scientists and all those folks who are able to do what we talked about, the collecting, curating, making sure that the data is clean and formatted or prepared in ways that are able to be used by the applications that do deliver the value they need to. All that optimization of the data and running the applications and all that is not child’s play.
So what you’re taking away from spending on associates, you’re redeploying on technology and people who have different, highly sophisticated skill sets you need to run and deploy them in productive ways. Then to your point, Marlene, which is very true just from my own experiences, it isn’t like the LLM tools I’ve used, which are somewhat limited to Harvey and Claude on my own stuff and some other ones, but nothing too crazy or on the fringe. It’s impressive to me how much it can kick out to me that’s well structured, but I’ve also been more often, I would say more often, at least a 50-50 split, where I go, wait a minute, what?
Then you have to go through and validate and pressure test everything and check and all that, right? That still requires judgment to know, number one, hey, that doesn’t sound right to me, I need to look into this. And then to know how to look into it too, right? So there is an interesting dimension of the talent piece of things that will be shifting. But from an economic standpoint, you’re not replacing expensive associates with nothing. You’re replacing them with other comparably expensive means of production, talent, and resources.
That’s part of those conversations that are starting to mature now with clients and firms, where you’re like, all right, look, the more that there’s an acknowledgment of that and you can have a mature discussion about what that really looks like in every different instance, the further we’ll come. That will help alleviate the AI-so-it’s-free type of rhetoric that I think is, and I think that’s improving now finally, that has been out of place in the conversation.
Marlene Gebauer (27:32)
So do you think it’ll really kill the partnership model? I mean, if you don’t have a pipeline of associates coming in to take that mantle at some point, does it become more of a corporate model where attorneys come in and do work based on their level, but it’s kind of a different profit model?
Keith Maziarek (27:53)
So this is an interesting dilemma. There’s another article I had on this that my friends at Am Law are always very kind to indulge me when I have these ideas and I write something on it, they publish them. But that was one I wrote, and it was, as you think about the narrowing pyramid, Steve Poor had a great one. He talked about it being like a rectangle instead of a pyramid at all, which is an interesting thing from a leverage standpoint.
But when you think about that, whatever the shape becomes, it’s obviously a lower-leverage model. There are a lot of interesting aspects of what that transformation brings to mind or dilemmas that need to be explored. How do you make subject matter expert partners when you’re only starting with a much smaller pool of associates in the first place, right? And then that smaller pool, because you can’t afford to have scores of extra people sitting around working two hours a day because all they have to do is do stuff on some LLM platform because that’s all there is to do, the work they would have historically done manually. You’re not going to hire that many people because you can’t float that bill to pay that many people to sit around and do things that are not productive enough to pay their way.
Does that bring salaries for associates down? Maybe, I don’t know. But I think it definitely brings the talent pool down, right? But you still have to create subject matter experts. So the yarn that I pulled on that idea as I was thinking about it was, instead of having an infantry model of recruiting of first-year associates or junior associates where you get a bunch of equally credentialed people and see who makes it through the first rounds of battle, five years later, the attrition numbers I found were after five years, 80 percent of people you recruited as first-year associates are gone. And you haven’t even gotten to the point where you’re starting to maybe be able to make some sort of profitable use of what their expertise is because they’re starting to develop higher-level skills then, right?
So it’s a tricky model to navigate, but you still need to get somewhere with that. So I said, okay, you can’t recruit an infantry unit anymore. It maybe takes more of a shape of a basketball team, where you’ve got three forwards, four guards, and one or two centers, and it’s a carefully composed team.
But then how do you recruit people that are going to have that perfect composition and cohesion? Maybe there are places in the recruiting process or the vetting process to go, we have to incorporate some sort of personality testing, skills-based testing, where you go, I can create cohesive units of these skill sets that go well together in the model that I need in order to be optimal. But then you have to keep them around, right? So you’re going to have to pay them a lot of money because you can’t afford a bunch of people leaving. It’s a lot bigger of a hit if you take one piece out of that puzzle. So anyway, it’s interesting stuff to think about. I don’t know the answers, but it’s fun to think about what might create them, or what that future might look like.
Greg Lambert (30:39)
Yeah. Well, I’m going to take that piece of yarn and pull on it a little bit more because your vision of where we should be sounds really good. Now, let me put a dose of reality here with large law firms now recruiting first-year law students before they’ve even taken their first exam. And I’ve talked with law professors recently that said that those students that are being hired are stressed the hell out. It has put a whole different pressure on us. And so the market is moving in almost the exact opposite way that everyone is saying it should be moving.
So how do you consult with clients to talk them off this cliff? Because everyone’s thinking, if I don’t get that talent now, the Skaddens and everyone else are going to get that talent and we’re not going to have that talent.
Keith Maziarek (31:48)
So there’s a weird, what’s the word I’m looking for? Like, systemic dimension to first-year recruiting that I’ve never really been able to business…
Greg Lambert (31:57)
Yeah, I call it insanity, but you know, systemic.
Keith Maziarek (32:14)
Yeah, fair. I was going to say, that’s a better, more rational term. It’s challenging to find compelling business rationale for what that approach is.
I asked questions about this when I was much younger and didn’t know any better. And I still don’t have really good answers for them. But it was like, okay, look, if you think about the Wachtell thing or whoever it is, it’s on the top of the heap that starts setting the prices every year and going, oh, we’re going to pay first-year associates this. The ripple effects of that through different segments of the Am Law 200 that are never going to be recruiting the same people that Skadden, Wachtell, or whoever is getting in the first place, paying that same thing. It’s always been an interesting phenomenon to me that didn’t make a whole lot of business sense, and it doesn’t seem sustainable, especially not now if you’re going that much further back when you don’t even really know what you’re dealing with, right? Like a 1L, what have they proven yet other than that they got into that school, right?
Maybe, I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it this way. I’m thinking about it now. Maybe people that focus on this have realized whether they’re a 1L or a 3L, I don’t see a whole lot of differentiation between what the product I’m buying is at those different pieces. So I might as well almost be buying forward contracts for jet fuel, like airlines do so they can minimize or normalize what their cost profile looks like over longer time horizons. Maybe that’s a factor that I’ve never been exposed to. It would explain it to some extent, right? So I don’t know.
Greg Lambert (33:44)
The law students are the futures market for aviation fuel.
Keith Maziarek (33:47)
Yes, exactly. It’s futures and options contracts, you know?
Greg Lambert (33:53)
So Keith, I know that you’ve been involved in the Legal Value Network. You were co-founder with that, and I’m sure you were involved with P3 before that, back and also a member of the College of Law Practice Management. So I know you write and you’re constantly out there, but I’m curious to see what do you do to stay up with everything that’s going on in the market? How do you keep up with things?
Keith Maziarek (34:31)
It’s real easy. The Geek in Review is kind of like, I don’t really need to go anywhere else. So it’s comprehensive.
Greg Lambert (34:34)
There you go.
Marlene Gebauer (34:36)
That’s it. That’s it. And we’re done. Thanks.
Greg Lambert (34:40)
And the music is by Jerry David DeCicca, so thank you, guys.
Keith Maziarek (34:42)
No, but honestly, yeah, The Geek in Review is definitely part of the diet there. As far as writing, I have historically always included the ALM Morning Update thing on the business of law topics. That tends to be a pretty steady stream of content that touches on topics that I think about a lot, or maybe I think about them a lot because I look at them every day. But that’s one. People would say I’m relatively active on LinkedIn, and I will usually find articles in there that I go, you know what, I’ll have some thoughts and I’ll start putting my ramblings. I’ll share the article, and a lot of times those are ALM articles. So I look at that pretty regularly.
As far as other publications, I’m a huge sucker for anything survey oriented. So all the Thomson Reuters ones are the ones that come out from Wolters Kluwer or even Clocktimizer on the client side, any of those types of things. Blickstein’s for sure. Through LVN, we had a lot of fun for a number of years. Hopefully we can rehash that project because it was really great. But partnering with Blickstein on the LPPM survey with LVN, the LDO survey, it’s always, again, wanting to facilitate or nurture those conversations with the people on the other side to help navigate better relationships. You can’t do any better than getting that right-from-the-horse’s-mouth type of information, to understand where their thoughts are, where the finger on the pulse is of things changing in the industry. So you can go into those conversations informed and educated on where they come in.
And I listen to a lot of podcasts, like you guys obviously, right? But then also Laura Terrell, who does Big Law Life. Laura and I go way back. We worked together at DLA. I think the stuff she’s putting out serves such an underserved niche in the industry to help people navigate all the folklore type of things that nobody tells you and you learn the hard way. I think that’s great stuff. So it’s great to listen to those.
Greg Lambert (36:25)
Oh yeah. And I think she’s been on the show twice now.
Marlene Gebauer (36:46)
She has. She’s been on, yep.
Keith Maziarek (36:49)
I knew once. You said twice? That’s good, yeah.
Greg Lambert (36:52)
Well, before you get too far off track, because there may be some listeners that aren’t as familiar with the Legal Value Network and what they do, do you mind giving a little overview of what LVN was set up to do and who would be interested in it?
Keith Maziarek (37:08)
Yeah, and I appreciate the opportunity to give a little shout to them. So LVN, we founded it seven days before lockdown started in 2020 for COVID, which was fantastic timing. If you want to learn about pivoting and being nimble, that’s a fun way to do it.
But it’s basically a professional association, a community of business of law professionals across a number of different functional alignments within law firms, legal departments, as well as we call them business partners, that could be technology providers, consultants, any other service providers to the space. Basically, it’s a place for people to come together, get more information on best practices. There’s a lot of thought leadership content that’s generated through a number of different channels. We’ve got webinars that we do on, I think it’s a bimonthly basis now. It used to be monthly because when it was COVID, you couldn’t do anything else.
But we have live programming too every year. In September in Chicago, we do the LVNx Conference Experience, which is between 400 and 500 professionals that come together across pricing, innovation, knowledge management, profitability, legal project management. What else am I forgetting? We get some BD folks and marketing folks that are involved in the conversations as well as our friends on the client side and legal ops.
And then, as I mentioned, folks on the data and technology side. So those are the typical constituents or stakeholder groups that contribute to the conversations. We have what I like to say are pretty well-rounded agendas on all the different subject matter topics that are covered.
Other things we have in the spring, we usually do a series of road trip or pit stop events where people can get together in their own local cities with the people in their local communities that are in the business of law sphere, ecosystem, and have those connections so they can set up other happy hours and things for themselves locally. And then we have the Off the Clock podcast that Justin Ergler and I do. Justin’s one of my co-founders and partners as well.
So yeah, it’s a membership organization. You can join either individually or as a group membership for your whole team or your whole firm and the different people that operate in this space across your firm. That gets you discounts on conference registration. You get all the webinars for free, all the other thought leadership content for free.
And one other quick plug. One of my other co-founders, Stuart Dodds, and I, before he kind of retired from LVN as well as retired, retired, retired, took all of the thought leadership content we had developed through webinars, publications, and subject matter content that had been developed for LVNx over the last five or six years, and we put it together in what is called, really clever name, the Resource Library. I think we could have done better with that. But it’s organized into a taxonomy by subject matter.
So what you can basically do is use all the thought leadership content that LVN has developed over the years as a means of not only staying up to date on latest developments yourself, but when you have new people coming into your team or other subject matter areas that you’re not fully up to speed on or want to learn what’s latest and greatest and newest in the industry, you can go into that and quickly access all this structured, targeted content for your benefit there. So that was what we think is a pretty powerful member benefit for joining as well.
If you go to legalvaluenetwork.com, you can see all the information there on membership, whatever. You can reach out to me. I’m happy to help. We just had a new board come in, the second generation of the board, and they’re doing all kinds of great things that are starting to be announced now. So I’m really excited for that next chapter of LVN’s life cycle.
Marlene Gebauer (40:57)
Well, before we get to the crystal ball question, I did have one question for you because you have just started on your own. What are the types of questions and advice that you’re being asked to provide, and what are the things you think that people should be asking about?
Keith Maziarek (41:14)
Yeah. I get approached, I’ve always gotten approached relatively frequently by people asking me questions. Now that I don’t have any restrictions from a competitive standpoint, I get approached by a lot of people. Well, it’s interesting because I kind of start going, this is interesting because I learn a lot about things from people who wouldn’t have asked me these questions before. I’m finding out it’s been very educational because I’m learning about challenges people have that I didn’t think people had at certain levels anymore.
Marlene Gebauer (41:28)
Now you can answer all the questions.
Keith Maziarek (41:42)
So it’s been interesting from that perspective. But not surprisingly, the vast majority of the questions I’m approached on are, so AI is already transforming the way that we do things, the way the client does things, the way the clients do things. How are we supposed to continue to make money doing this? What is the pricing magic that you need to bring or what’s the formula for this new era of services, right? So that’s what I get asked the most. And if you’re not asking me that, you probably should.
But the reality is, again, going back to those parallels between the AFA revolution and the AI revolution, it’s somewhat reassuring to know that there are no secret formulas that only a couple people know and they’re presiding over and only leaking out to special confidential folks. There is a lot of experimentation and trial and error on that topic. But what all the thinking seems to be orbiting around is, I’ve always loved all the Kill the Billable Hour and Death of the Billable Hour articles that come out because I got so overwhelmingly fatigued with those by 2011 that when I’ve seen them continue to come out now, and even in higher frequency because now AI can write those headlines and you get more and more of them, it’s kind of crazy.
I think the pretty constant theme from those who kind of know, I think know what they’re talking about in the industry, and I would agree with them. I don’t know if that means I know what I’m talking about or I don’t, but there’s definitely a bigger place for hybrid approaches where you’re going to have components of work that are going to be fixed fee. That goes back to my article about how the budgetary certainty is going to be a bigger piece. It’s because you can fixed fee components that will have greater levels of certainty or lower levels of variance than you were able to and then leave the rest of it to variable models if it’s hourly billing or things that are partial contingency or whatever it might be where there’s a risk-sharing component to it.
But there is no new model that nobody ever conceptualized in the past that I’ve heard of yet that is starting to take the world by storm or poised to. So it’s usually questions revolving around that and then around, what are firms starting to do or clients starting to do themselves to transform some of these workflows that are affecting the economics of some of the different subject matter areas that we operate in?
And that varies practice by practice and area of law by area of law. But having those diagnostic conversations about, okay, here’s your particular problem and here’s what you could do in order to reimagine the way you’re doing the work. Then there are interesting conversations that are triggered by that line of questioning or discussion that are, do you want to be in this business anymore? And not in the business at all, but do you need to transform the way you do the work, or are you better off going, instead of me buying a couple more point solutions or trying to find all these other people to do this work, why don’t we give that to an ALSP or something like that?
Or at least look at that type of hybrid service delivery approach model and see if there’s some merit in that as opposed to trying to buy everything we need and curate everything we need to be all things to all people. I think there’s a different level of relevance or intensity of rationale for using ALSPs in a more collaborative way given AI than there was in 2018 or 2019. I thought there was this big fever over ALSPs are getting bigger and they’re going to take a lot of stuff, and it never really seemed to materialize. I think those dimensions might have a little bit different way of being evaluated now, so we could see that. Anyway, just a couple examples of the things I’m being asked about a lot.
Marlene Gebauer (45:39)
Very, very interesting.
Keith Maziarek (45:44)
Yeah, it’s an interesting time to be around, which is again kind of why I decided to go, why don’t I try and see what other interesting adventures I can go on now given the market conditions and things that are happening.
Marlene Gebauer (45:56)
It seems that there is a lot in flux, and this is sort of the perfect time for somebody who’s got expertise to be able to advise that way. So crystal ball question, 2027. Now our question says it’s going to be a lawyer freakout time. I’m going to be just like firm freakout time because not only are you having a different relationship between, you know, legal ops, between partners, between more experienced and less experienced attorneys. It’s also between legal ops and attorneys. It’s also between allied staff and attorneys. So what’s the single biggest change you see in terms of firm structure and the relationships and how work gets done?
Keith Maziarek (46:48)
Single biggest change, man, there are a lot of equally big changes.
Marlene Gebauer (46:50)
I know.
Greg Lambert (46:51)
You can name two or three.
Marlene Gebauer (46:53)
And you can answer the question the way you want to answer. We trust you. We trust you.
Keith Maziarek (46:55)
Are you sure you want to give me that level of latitude? I mean, I don’t know how much time we’re at now, but I think we’re coming to the end, right?
Greg Lambert (46:59)
Let’s see where it goes.
Keith Maziarek (47:01)
We can always cut out whatever you don’t want to use, right?
I think that as tools and processes that are being transformed a bit and automated more start to be progressed on the maturity curve more, and there’s less experimental nature to them and a little bit more of, here’s a new way to do things, I would expect you will start seeing an equally prompt level of urgency from law firms to go, okay, now these things are materializing, right?
I feel like a lot of the use case experimentation so far has kind of been like seeing the fields to go, okay, what is practical or sustainable? What is meaningful? What’s going to impact us? What can we leverage to our advantage? I think you’re going to start seeing more clarity on those things. Then I would expect you would see changes being made where it can be credibly done without upsetting the stability or the continuity of what law firms do now, right?
So you might see, I would hope, I would expect you would see a lot more focus on what is our revenue and profitability model now? Because we do have to rethink what are the means of production and what is the market value of what we do, right? And I think the maturity of that discussion of market value is still relatively immature, but that’s going to have to ramp up to go, okay, well, if it costs us this much, factoring in whatever cost accounting factors you want to for all the infrastructure that you’ve had to put in place to do the work that much faster, what premium do you place on leveraging that for this type of work, right?
So I think instead of, we’ve been in experimental mode with those things and how you monetize the work, I think the velocity of those conversations and models is going to start to increase. That will, by association, start transforming who are the winners or the losers. I think that triggers a lot of things from an industry structure standpoint. There are some firms that have not really done much to start adopting or even experimenting in how should we start changing the way we do things across different pieces of our business.
I feel like there may be a reckoning time coming or at least a rude awakening where it’s like, man, we really should have gotten on this sooner because now we’re struggling and we’re now an acquisition target as opposed to being a leader. You know what I mean? So I think as maturity in those transformations starts to come about, that will be the trigger event that’s going to start these business principle and business concept focuses to permeate more into how lawyers do their work and then how management needs to be considering, okay, what is the product we’re putting out in the market and how do we want to optimize that for the way some of these changes are happening?
Like I said, there’s been good experimentation. It’s good that people are taking it seriously. But you can’t, Toby always used this example, right? It’s hard to change the wheel on a car when it’s driving. It’s the same thing. If you start from scratch, and there are some AI-native firms out there that, you know, Michael Pearson I met at Legal Tech Fund last year when I spoke with him on a panel, and I didn’t know a whole lot about them until I met him and I started researching it more. You’re seeing a lot of traction with those things. So those are other approaches to doing it, but that’s starting with a different model as opposed to changing one while you’re already in process.
I just feel like there are so many interconnected dominoes, right? Once you trip one, these other ones start to go. But I feel like that will be the origin story of where it comes from, okay, the maturity of what the processes are, as well as tool reliability and recognized unreliability. Like, you know what it can do and you know what it can’t do. So know where you have to have the humans in the loop and establish the judgment or processes that are going to help facilitate using it effectively and responsibly. That’s what’s going to start tripping all these other circuits to change some of the other components.
Marlene Gebauer (50:52)
We live in interesting times.
Greg Lambert (50:52)
Definitely.
Keith Maziarek (50:53)
Definitely. Definitely interesting.
Greg Lambert (50:55)
Change is hard, but change is also constant. It’s an odd combination. Well, Keith Maziarek of Lucratic Method, we want to thank you very much for coming on the show finally and then letting us go completely off script while we were talking to you. This has been great.
Keith Maziarek (51:16)
Well, you can always count on me for that, and I thank you for finally inviting me. I hope it wasn’t my off-script tendencies that scared you away before, but see, I can be responsible. Awesome, awesome. Thank you so much, guys. Seriously, great conversation, great seeing you guys. I really do appreciate it.
Greg Lambert (51:23)
Well, we promise it won’t be eight years before we get you back on.
Marlene Gebauer (51:27)
We promise. We promise. Yeah, thanks, Keith.
And thanks to all of you listeners for taking the time to listen to the podcast. Don’t forget to like and subscribe, please.
Greg Lambert (51:41)
Yes. So Keith, what’s the best place for listeners to reach out and learn more about you and the Lucratic Method?
Keith Maziarek (51:49)
Yeah, so I’m on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on there posting things and everything else. So you can find me there. Surprisingly, not too many Keith Maziareks.
Greg Lambert (51:55)
How many Keith Maziareks are there on LinkedIn?
Keith Maziarek (52:15)
I found other Maziareks, though. It’s not a very common name. I have found other ones, which has been interesting, that are not people I know I’m related to. But yeah, so you can search me in there. It’s really easy. I’m grateful for anybody that wants to follow me or connect with me. I’m always very open to connections.
And then, yeah, if you want to look up Lucratic Method, it’s lucraticmethod.com. There’s a website on there outlining some of the things that I’ve done and areas of focus that I’ve had exposure to that I can hopefully leverage there. And then bodhisolutions.io is the software company that we didn’t touch on too much, but another exciting thing that I’ve been working on. It’s another adventure I’m going through now too. So bodhisolutions.io. You can check that out too. Thank you, guys.
Marlene Gebauer (52:44)
And as always, music here is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you, Jerry. And bye, everybody.