Law firm partner returning from holiday. 3 things on your to-do-list right now. Book Law Firm Partner Compensation Once September arrives, the leisurely summer feeling is replaced by the regular drum of the office. Summer is more than a time to unwind and relax with family and friends, away from the office. It is also a time to recharge and get new energy and inspiration. Judging from the comments, a number of you used the break to read my book on Law Firm Partner Compensation (www.lawfirmpartnercompensation.com). The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, thank you for that. I remember as a kid the excitement when the new school year started. I went to buy new books and a fresh agenda. Everything new, holding a promise of a new year, in which I could have a fresh start and a clean, well-organized way of studying. Unfortunately, after a week or so at school, all good resolutions had faded. The challenge is to convert inspiration into action. All too often within days back at the office, or even hours, routine sets in, inspiration and resolutions are forgotten, and everything pivots back to how it was before. This happens every time and it is a missed opportunity. To help you avoid that this year, here are three things that should be on your priority list right now. 1. Invest in talent The time-based pyramid model is running out of road. For decades a law firm's structure was simple: a broad base of associates billing hours, a thin layer of partners capturing the margin. AI is now eroding the fundament that sits at the base of this business model: every routine task can be done faster. Associates will need more than knowledge of the law to remain valuable. (Chapter 14 in the book) The leading firms are already recruiting differently. Some US firms have gone as far as recruiting students on campus who will not start their first year until this September, locking in talent early because they know the competition for people who can operate at this new level is only going to get tighter. Big-four accountancy firm Ernst & Young has reserved 100 million in bonusses for ‘human’ skills. What should you be looking for in that talent? Focus on critical independent thinking and the 7-Core Dimensions©: understanding the client's business, creativity, practice development, practice management, people skills, presence and confidence, integrity (Chapter 4 in the book) This matters more, not less, as AI takes over production. As the pyramid transitions into a diamond, the associates who remain need to be more capable. Focused on judgement and client communication rather than document production. The gap between an average lawyer and an exceptional one is no longer capped by the hours in the day. A lawyer with real judgement, directing AI, can produce what used to take an entire practice group. A lawyer without that judgement just gets faster at producing average work. Recruit and develop on the 7-Core Dimensions©, and build them into how you train and pay people, and you end up with more of the first kind. 2. Develop alternative pricing models The hourly rate is not a legal tradition. It is a mid-twentieth-century invention that became standard practice from the 1950s onward, and it is about to sunset. For most of legal history lawyers charged based on the value of the work at the end of a matter. The billable hour shifted the risk of inefficiency onto the client: the longer a task took, the more the firm earned. That arrangement worked well and law firm profitability has grown consistently substantially over the past decades. AI breaks that business model, because it attacks and erodes the time a task takes, and the legal market is not growing fast enough to absorb the difference. Here is the arithmetic. Take a firm of 200 lawyers generating $500,000 revenue per lawyer, 50 equity partners, a 50% profit margin. The firm spends $1 million on AI that makes its lawyers 5% more efficient. If the volume of work stays the same, the firm bills fewer hours for the same output. Revenue drops roughly 5%, to $95 million. Costs go up by the $1 million spent on the technology, to $51 million. Profit falls from $50 million to $44 million, a 12% drop, and profit per partner falls from $1 million to $880,000. That is a conservative estimate. Firms that keep billing by the hour while adopting AI are effectively cutting their own profit. This is where the Value Matrix© comes in. What a client is willing to pay depends on two things: the return on investment the work generates for them, and how many other lawyers could do the work equally well. It has never depended on how many hours it took. Price on that basis before your clients do it for you. In-house teams are investing in technology, over half have already adopted generative AI themselves, and most expect to rely less on outside counsel because of it. Getting good at fixed fees and value-based pricing now, while you still have room to experiment, beats being forced into it later with no margin left to give. (Chapters 2 and 14 in the book) 3. Get out of your silo and break down the walls Most blue-chip clients do not hire an individual lawyer. They hire the firm, expecting access to the full range of talent, contacts and experience the brand represents. That only works if partners actually operate as a team rather than as a collection of individual practices sharing a building and a billing system. When partners hoard clients and refuse to bring in other departments for fear of losing credit, the firm's collective value stays locked up. The sum of everyone's revenue ends up lower than it would be with real cooperation, even if a few individuals do better for themselves in the short run. We call the alternative swarm intelligence: combining the collective knowledge, experience and creativity of the whole partnership instead of leaving it trapped in individual practices. I know a premier AmLaw 100 firm where partners routinely consult the wider partnership for ideas on a matter. That habit is part of why they keep beating firms with more individually talented partners but less willingness to talk to each other.(Chapter 6 in the book) Here is the uncomfortable part. Swarm intelligence and real collaboration are in the interest of both the client and the firm, and most partners will agree with that if you ask them directly. In practice, plenty still prefer to work alone, keeping their clients away from other partners rather than bringing the wider team in. Some of this is income: a shared mandate usually means shared credit, and a smaller number next to your name at year end. Some of it is trust, or the lack of it: a partner who doubts a colleague will deliver the same quality will not risk the client relationship to find out. A compensation system that puts individual performance under the magnifying glass, origination, hours billed, revenue booked under your own name, rewards exactly this instinct. It tells every partner that protecting their own book is the safer bet. There is also a tribal element underneath it. It is my firm against the competition, but my practice group against the firm, and my team against the practice group. Loyalty runs strongest at the smallest unit, not at the level of the partnership as a whole. A compensation system built solely on individual numbers reinforces exactly that. So look hard at what yours actually rewards. If it only measures individual production, it will keep producing individualism, no matter what the culture statement on your website says. (Chapter 5 and 12 in the book) Read the book! All three of these, talent, pricing and culture, are covered in more depth in Law Firm Partner Compensation, including the full framework behind the 7-Core Dimensions©, the Value Matrix© and what AI is actually doing to the economics of the profession. This article is part of a weekly series drawing on the themes of Law Firm Partner Compensation by Jaap Bosman and Jaime Fernández Madero. If you would like to know more about this topic, read the book. Our book Law Firm Partner Compensation is available worldwide on Amazon, national online book sellers, and can be ordered at your favorite at your favorite bookstore

Last week I met with a partner I have known for a long time. His firm, which he has led as managing partner for two terms, is widely considered the leading law firm in his country, an institution over a century old, built on a reputation for values and quality that few competitors can match. When the conversation turned to my new book on Law Firm Partner Compensation, he stopped me. He looked at me the way one looks when admitting a loss in the family. “You know Jaap,” he said, "last year we had to abandon the pure lockstep.” Pressure from a number of highly successful younger partners, who had 'threatened' to leave for a more 'aggressive' competitor. I did not see it coming. The culture at that firm is genuinely strong, not the performative kind that collapses the moment money gets involved. But I was not surprised either. The lockstep, once the hallmark of the world’s most respected institutional law firms, is disappearing. What replaces it almost everywhere is the modified lockstep. Partners are still allocated profit points, the device that gives every partner a direct stake in how the firm performs as a collective rather than just in what they personally bill. What changes is how those points get handed out. Seniority can still play a role, and often does, but it is no longer the only driver, or even the main one. Performance, origination and leadership contribution can all enter the formula. The modified lockstep is not a weaker lockstep. It is a different mechanism wearing the same name. What the lockstep actually set out to solve is worth stating plainly, because it gets lost under the mechanics. The aim was to put the interest of the firm ahead of the interest of any individual partner, on the theory that if the institution thrives, every partner thrives with it. A beautifully aligned incentive, on paper. In practice it has never really worked, not in the pure sense the theory describes. Individual, short-term self-interest keeps winning out over collective, long-term interest, because that is what people do. It is not a flaw in any particular firm’s culture. It is human nature, operating exactly as you would expect. The lockstep works, when it works, not because the formula removed self-interest but because something else was holding it in check: shared ambition, trust, and generosity among the partners. Those are the conditions, not the formula. When they hold, lockstep firms are extraordinary places to practise law. When they erode, no formula, pure or modified, survives the erosion for long. Paul Cravath joined what became Cravath, Swaine & Moore in 1899. He built something the legal profession had not really had before: a firm designed to outlive its partners rather than dissolve with them. Associates were salaried rather than commission earners. All business in the office became firm business, not the personal property of whoever happened to bring it in, and origination was never tracked or rewarded. Competition between partners was ended by anchoring compensation to seniority. The strict points ladder we know today as the lockstep, where a partner climbs one rung a year until reaching a plateau, took decades to harden into its modern form. The founding principle did not. The institution mattered more than the individual, from the start. Several of the firms built around that principle, Cravath foremost among them, became the most prestigious and most profitable in the world. For decades the correlation held. Lockstep firms outperformed eat-what-you-kill firms in both income and reputation. The theory was elegant. Remove the financial reward for hoarding a client or a mandate, and partners will staff matters with whoever is best suited, not whoever needs the credit. Reality has been less generous. Under a collective system, partners do not stop noticing who is and is not pulling their weight. If anything they become hypersensitised to it. A partner under pressure to keep climbing the ladder will quietly open a file under their own name rather than hand it to the colleague better placed to run it. They will hold onto a client relationship a little too tightly. None of this looks like self-interest on the surface. It looks like diligence. But the effect on staffing quality is the same as in any other system. The most suitable partner does not always end up on the mandate. The most visible one does. Pure lockstep does not abolish performance pressure either. It relocates it. A partner some distance from the plateau watches the total number of points in the pool grow every year as new partners join below them, which means their own slice shrinks in relative terms even as the firm grows. The pressure to generate revenue, to be seen contributing, to avoid the gate that can freeze or reverse progression, is constant. Some lockstep firms have introduced what amounts to negative lockstep, where a partner who stalls can be moved back down the ladder rather than merely held in place. Seniority was meant to remove the scoreboard. It only changed what was being scored. There is a separate problem, and in my experience a more corrosive one than performance pressure: the ambition gap. A partnership can absorb a wide spread in revenue generation as long as the spread in ambition stays narrow. What genuinely poisons a partnership is not the colleague who earns less. It is the colleague who does not put in the effort. The partner who treats equity like a nine-to-five arrangement, who objects to every initiative and follows up on none of them. No compensation tweak fixes that, because the problem was never financial. Stripping points from an unambitious partner does not make them more ambitious. It just makes them poorer, sitting next to partners who are neither. Cravath itself eventually discovered that theory and lateral market reality do not always agree. Scott Barshay’s departure for Paul Weiss in 2016, reportedly trading a Cravath pay ceiling in the low four millions for something closer to ten at his new firm, became the symbol of a wider problem. It was not the sole cause of what followed, but it was the moment the industry started asking the question out loud. How long can an institution this prestigious keep paying its best dealmaker the same as everyone else at his level, while a rival is free to pay whatever it takes? Cravath held the line for years. Then in 2021 it formally moved to a modified lockstep, framed by its leadership as a way to reward extraordinary contribution rather than tenure alone. The firm that gave the model its name no longer runs it in its purest form. Which leaves two significant holdouts, Wachtell, Lipton in New York and Slaughter and May in London. At Slaughter and May partners there still retrieve their napkins from individual pigeonholes at Bunhill Row, a small ritual that says more about the firm’s self-image than any compensation memo could. There is no financial incentive to hoard a client, so referring a major mandate to a better-placed colleague costs nothing. The trust that produces is real, and hard for merit-based firms to replicate. But the cost is becoming visible. Two partners left last year, derivatives partner Oliver Wicker for Simmons & Simmons, M&A partner Paul Mudie for personal reasons. Barely two months later, corporate partner Mark Zerdin, more than two decades into his career at the firm, joined Paul Hastings. Three rare events in close succession, at a firm where lateral departures used to be newsworthy precisely because they almost never happened. Market commentators are asking the same question they once asked about Cravath. Not whether the lockstep will go, but how much longer it can hold. Every institution that has clung to the pure model has eventually discovered the same thing. Seniority can buy loyalty for a generation. It cannot buy it forever, not while a rival is willing to write a cheque that says otherwise, and not once the trust and generosity the model depends on stop being renewed. The lockstep was never really about fairness. It was a bet that shared ambition and mutual trust would outcompete individual self-interest over the long run. For a hundred years, at a handful of extraordinary firms, that bet paid off. What we are watching now is not the failure of an idea. It is the slow, well-mannered admission that even the best bets eventually come due. This article is part of a weekly series drawing on the themes of Law Firm Partner Compensation by Jaap Bosman and Jaime Fernández Madero. If you would like to know more about this topic, read the book. Our book Law Firm Partner Compensation is available worldwide on Amazon, national online book sellers, and can be ordered at your favorite at your favorite bookstore

Management summary Kirkland & Ellis, the largest law firm in the world, has put $500 million into a system built with Palantir. It will be reported as an AI story. It is really a data story. The clever part is not a better chatbot. It is turning decades of messy fund paperwork into clean, structured data the firm can rely on without rechecking. Tools like Harvey and Legora, for all their strengths, cannot do this dependably, because they work by prediction and will sometimes get it wrong. The software behind this will eventually be available to buy. The clean data will not. That is the real barrier, and most firms cannot keep even a simple client database in order. So the firms that pull ahead will not be the ones with the deepest pockets. They will be the ones whose data is in order, and on that score almost everyone is starting behind. Preparing means two things: take data seriously enough to hire a senior person to own it, and accept that the firm will change shape, with data and AI specialists working beside lawyers in client-facing teams, some at partner level and paid accordingly. I will admit something. Until a few weeks ago, whenever I heard the name Palantir, a particular picture formed: government contracts, intelligence agencies, surveillance programmes, software for tracking enemies abroad and, now and then, citizens at home. I never examined the impression. If I am honest, I never really looked into the company at all. Palantir simply sat, in my mind, somewhere on the Dark Side. It turns out I was wrong. What changed my mind was a deal. This month Kirkland & Ellis, the largest law firm in the world by revenue, announced a multiyear partnership with Palantir, backed by a $500 million commitment to its own AI. Most of the profession read the headline, filed it under “another big firm does AI,” and moved on. That filing is the mistake. The genius of what Kirkland has done has almost nothing to do with drafting and almost everything to do with data. Once I understood why, I stopped thinking about the Dark Side and started thinking about how badly the rest of the profession has misread what this signals. Why the Kirkland and Palantir deal is really about data. The hard part of private equity fund formation was never writing the documents. It was keeping track of what they promise. A single fund carries hundreds of side letters, each granting one investor something specific: a fee discount, an excuse right, a transfer restriction, a most-favoured-nation clause that silently entitles them to any better terms a later investor receives. Across a dozen funds and several hundred investors, those promises form a web of live obligations that interact with one another, with every new fund term, and with every transaction the manager wants to make, for years. Checking a continuation vehicle against that web is not a reading task. It is a tracking task at a scale no human team can hold in its head. It pays to be precise about what tools like Harvey and Legora actually do, because they do it well. Both are built on large language models. Ask Harvey whether a side letter’s MFN clause matches the template, and it will tell you. Feed Legora a thousand contracts and it will pull the key terms into a grid, with citations back to the source. For drafting, summarising and review, these are a genuine advance, and any firm not using something like them is already behind. But they share three limits, and none is a bug the next release will fix. First, they guess. A language model predicts probable text; it estimates rather than knows. On Harvey’s own benchmark, its best model still invents roughly one claim in 500, and independent testing of legal research tools has found higher rates. The emerging consensus is that hallucination is inherent to these models, not a defect to be engineered away. One error in 500 is excellent for a drafting assistant. For a covenant check across a $50 billion raise, where a single missed clause is a multimillion-dollar breach, almost always right is the wrong standard. Second, they work one question at a time, against the documents. Nothing durable sits underneath. Ask again next month, after three new side letters land, and the tool rereads the pile from scratch. There is no single source of truth holding, at all times, the current state of every obligation. Third, they struggle with identity at scale. “Texas Teachers,” “TRS” and “Teacher Retirement System of Texas” are one investor; a model that infers this across decades of inconsistent drafting accumulates quiet errors. What Palantir adds is the thing the announcements bury under the word “ontology,” and it is simpler than it sounds. Palantir does not point a model at the documents and ask it to be careful. It uses the model once, as a labourer, to lift each obligation out of the prose and turn it into a structured fact: an MFN clause, owned by this investor, in this fund, triggered by these conditions, expiring on this date. That fact then lives inside a governed model of the whole business, where every fund, investor, clause and transaction is an object linked to every other. And here is what matters. Once the obligation is structured data, the compliance check no longer runs on the language model at all. It runs on fixed logic, hard rules applied to hard data. The probabilistic engine reads. The deterministic engine judges. That division of labour is the whole game. So the genius is not that Kirkland bought cleverer AI. It is that Kirkland refused to let the answer to “does this breach a covenant” come from a model’s best guess, and built the layer where it does not have to. Harvey and Legora answer questions about documents. Kirkland is building a system that answers questions from a model of its business. One is a brilliant reader. The other is a system of record that uses AI to fill and query itself. The advantage is real, and it is worth being exact about its source. It is not the software, which others will eventually license. It is three things a rival cannot simply buy: the capital; the proprietary corpus, the nearly $500 billion of fundraising Kirkland touched in a single year, which is the reference data the system learns from; and ownership of the application layer, where the firm’s own judgement is encoded. This is a moat, not a monopoly. Every fund still has investors who need their own counsel, and there will always be a firm across the table. But that firm is now doing a fundamentally different job from one still billing hours to reread the side letters. The gap that is actually opening Almost no firm outside the largest American practices will ever have either ingredient. They will not write a nine-figure cheque, and they do not sit on a proprietary record of half a trillion dollars in annual deal flow. Realistically, every firm outside the US is a national champion: large at home, small against Kirkland. The temptation is to call this someone else’s problem and wait. That is the wrong call, because the capability will arrive off the shelf. Every serious enterprise software vendor now sells a version of the same idea, and legal-specific versions will follow. Within a few years a national champion will license an obligation-tracking engine without rebuilding Palantir from nothing. The platform commoditises. Which sounds like good news, until you remember the platform was never the hard part. The data is. An engine like this is only as good as what you feed it, and what you feed it is your own data, cleaned, reconciled and trustworthy. This is exactly where firms are weakest. The honest test is simple: most firms cannot keep a CRM clean. They cannot say with confidence who knows whom, which partner owns which relationship, or what the firm has done for a client over ten years, because that information is scattered across inboxes, spreadsheets, document systems and partners’ memories, and no one owns it. A firm that cannot maintain a contact database has no hope of maintaining a live model of every obligation across every fund. Feed a clean engine dirty data and it will industrialise the mess. So the real divide is not between firms that can afford the software and firms that cannot. It is between firms whose data is in order and firms whose data is chaos. Almost everyone starts behind, which is the one genuinely good piece of news for the smaller firm: data discipline is not bought with scale. A determined firm that gets serious now can close the gap faster than its size would suggest. This is also where the argument about outside capital stops being a matter of principle. Building real data capability costs money a partnership funds from its own distributions, which means partners feel it in their own pay this year for a benefit that lands three years out. Partnerships are structurally poor at exactly that kind of investment. Private equity money buys the runway to get the data house in order before the capability becomes the price of entry rather than an edge. The firms that took the investment will turn out to be the ones that could afford to act in time. What a sane firm does now Two things follow, one obvious and one structural. The obvious move is to treat data as a strategic asset rather than an IT cost. In practice that means giving data an owner with real standing: not a junior analyst parked in operations, but a senior data specialist with the authority to fix the plumbing and to change how lawyers record what they do, reporting high enough that partners have to listen. Most firms do not have this person. They have a help desk. The structural move is the one that will be resisted, because it changes the shape of the firm. As AI absorbs the production work that fills the base of the pyramid, the base narrows. Fewer juniors are needed, and those who remain must be more capable from their first day, working on judgement and client contact rather than document volume. The pyramid becomes a diamond, and the swollen middle of that diamond has to become a destination in its own right, not a waiting room on the way to an equity most will never reach. The diamond is not only a story about lawyers, and this is the part the profession is least ready for. It brings into the firm a class of senior professionals who are not lawyers at all: data scientists, legal engineers, pricing specialists, AI leads. In the old firm they sat in the back office and were paid as such. In the firm that is coming, they sit on the client-facing team. A data scientist who builds the model that shows a client which of its obligations are exposed, and presents it in the room, is not support staff. The work is economically indistinguishable from a partner’s. Which forces the awkward question I devote a chapter to in my latest book, Law Firm Partner Compensation: how do you pay such a person? In most jurisdictions a non-lawyer cannot hold equity, so formal partnership is closed to them. Pay them like a senior associate, though, and you will not keep them, because the pool of people who can do this work is small and the competition fierce. The honest answer is to build a structure that behaves like partnership even where the title is forbidden: shadow equity that tracks the firm’s performance and falls when profits fall, bonuses tied to outcomes you can actually measure, and a real voice on the matters they own. Recruit people for partner-level work and pay them like assistants, and they walk. That is not a moral observation. It is arithmetic. I began by confessing that I had filed Palantir under the Dark Side and left it there, unexamined. The irony is not lost on me that the company I associated with watching people from the shadows is the one that has shown my own profession something clarifying about its future. The light it casts is not flattering. It falls on an industry that has spent two years arguing about chatbots while the real contest moved to the data underneath, where almost no one was looking and almost no one is ready. Kirkland’s half a billion is the part no one else can copy. Taking data seriously, and letting non-lawyers into the room where the value is made, costs almost nothing. Which is why so few will do it. There is, it turns out, light from the Dark Side. The only question is who is willing to look at what it shows. This article is part of a weekly series drawing on the themes of Law Firm Partner Compensation by Jaap Bosman and Jaime Fernández Madero. If you would like to know more about this topic, read the book. Our book Law Firm Partner Compensation is available worldwide on Amazon, national online book sellers, and can be ordered at your favorite at your favorite bookstore

TGO Consulting - Award winning strategy consultants for the legal sector. Serving a global clientbase. Enhancing law firm profitability. what we do TGO Consulting are award winning business consultants focusing on the legal sector. We have a strong client base spanning most of Asia, Europe and the Americas. Our approach is fact based and result driven. We help our clients to maintain or improve their profitability. We work on the basis of a Financial Business Analysis© for which we have developed our own unique standardized model. This FBA© will highlight low hanging fruit and provide a benchmark against the market. Having decades of experience in the legal industry, we know the dynamics of partner groups inside out. During the process this will help overcome resistance and create buy-in. "everything must change for things to remain the same" - Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - Outside Investment? Why EU law must allow the MSO Private Equity investment, the new normal for law firms? articles of interest about us If it comes to serving a global client base and experience in working in different jurisdictions across the world, TGO Consulting is second to none. While understanding your home market and culture, we bring a wealth of experience in best market practice around the world. We know the legal industry inside out, past, present and future. We know your competitors and we know your clients. we strongly focus on enhancing our clients’ profitability the power of truly offering global best practice our new book - LAW FIRM PARTNER COMPENSATION - is the most complete and authoritative treatment of the subject ever written. The book covers every major compensation system — lockstep, eat-what-you-kill, modified lockstep and black box — alongside the psychology, culture and strategic dimensions that formal analysis almost always misses. It addresses the impact of AI and private equity on compensation models, includes a dedicated chapter on China, and draws on insights from the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia. Co-authored with Jaime Fernández Madero. Available on Amazon and through bookstores worldwide. Order on AMAZON a new concept There is no linear relation between time and value. We created the Creation-Production-Divide Concept©, a revolutionary new way to explain where the value is. This concept will fundamentally change the business of law. we strongly believe being a lawyer is about human skills a human-centric approach Being lawyers ourselves and having gained almost two decades of experience in private practice and in-house, we understand the dynamics of the partner group like few others. Although we always focus on our clients’ financial performance, we are strongly aware that the business of law is a human business before anything else. Understanding peoples’ drivers and behaviours is key to achieving lasting results. power curve Succession remains a sensitive and complex topic. The TGO power curve© analysis immediately shows succession and leadership vulnerabilities in the firm. This is just one of our data-based models in use. in the press 1/1 Interview on legal technology in La Gazette du Palais 未来十年，律师事务所的五大趋势 Article on the future of the legal profession Feature article in ACC Docket on how to prioritize for inhouse lawyers

TGO Consulting - Award winning strategy consultants for the legal sector. Serving a global clientbase. Enhancing law firm profitability. our publications books Death of a Law Firm (2015) English edition published by the American Bar Association. Chinese edition published by Law Press China. This book is about the business of law and the human dynamics that drive it. Death of a Law Firm has become an influential global bestseller. Data & Dialogue - a relationship redefined (2019); co-authored by Vincent Cordo. Available through Amazon. English edition only. This book is about the relationship between law firms and clients. It introduces revolutionary new concepts such as the Value Matrix© and the Creation-Production-Divide-Concept© A New Dawn – quick read edition (May 2020). Available through Amazon. English edition only. This book provides lawyers with comprehensive and practical guidance on how to navigate the Covid-19 economic crisis. This book will expand into a more elaborate ‘regular edition’ that will be published by the end of 2020 Law Firm Partner Compensation (May 2026) - This book is the most complete and authoritative treatment of the subject ever written. The book covers every major compensation system — lockstep, eat-what-you-kill, modified lockstep and black box — alongside the psychology, culture and strategic dimensions that formal analysis almost always misses. It addresses the impact of AI and private equity on compensation models, includes a dedicated chapter on China, and draws on insights from the US, Europe, Latin America and Asia. Co-authored with Jaime Fernández Madero. Available on Amazon and through bookstores worldwide. TGO Consulting is widely considered a thought leader on the business of law reports Commoditization of Legal Services (2016). TGO Consulting undertook a quantitative survey to which extend there is a real downward pressure on the price of legal services. Senior lawyers from over 100 business law firms across Europe participated on-line. Further, 15 general counsel, or persons in charge of managing outside legal services, were interviewed face-to-face. Mercenaries on the Move (2016). This is the first report that presents an in-depth analysis of lateral partner moves in the German market over a longer period of time. It covers the hiring activity of the 25 top-ranked law firms in the German legal market since the start of 2011. An analysis of the data provides an insight into the practice areas that are most concerned and which type of firms are hit the hardest by equity partners seeking opportunities elsewhere. articles TGO Consulting is widely considered one of the thought leaders on the business of law. We are regularly asked to contribute articles to Bloomberg, the ABA Journal, the ACC Docket and various other leading publications around the world. You can find pdf reprints of many of these articles under the press tab of this website. Your Friday Insight Since early 2018 we are publishing Your Friday Insight, a weekly article that comments on recent developments or provides food for thought or practical advice. All articles can be found on this website. If you never want to miss an article, you can subscribe for free. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the 'unsubscribe' button at the bottom of each email. If you unsubscribe your data will be deleted and you will receive no further emails. TGO Consulting uses Mailchimp for email distribution. Please read our privacy policy . submit thanks for subscribing! Read More

Jaap Bosman - award winning strategy consultant for the legal sector. Founder and CEO of TGO Consulting jaap bosman Jaap Bosman is founder and CEO of TGO Consulting, a strategy boutique advising elite law firms and premier legal departments across Europe, the Americas and Asia. He is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost strategy consultants to the legal sector. What sets him apart is not seniority or scale: it is a consistent ability to see what others in the field have not seen yet. The frameworks he developed — the TGO Value Matrix©, the Creation/Production Divide©, the TGO Power Curve©, and the 7-Core Dimensions© — are now standard reference points in legal market analysis, and were original when they were published. That originality has roots in an unusual background. Bosman studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven before reading law at Tilburg University, graduating with honours. He then spent fifteen years in legal practice. It is the intersection of those disciplines — design thinking, rigorous legal training, and senior consulting experience — that produces the quality of thinking his clients come for. In 2013, the Financial Times recognised him with its first-ever Innovative Lawyers Award for International Strategy. He was also the first non-American to receive the Thomson Reuters and Hubbard One Excellence in Legal Marketing Award (2011). He has written four books on the business of law, most recently Law Firm Partner Compensation (2026), co-authored with Jaime Fernández Madero. He has contributed to the ABA Journal, Bloomberg Law, and the ACC Docket, and lectures internationally. Read More speaking engagements Jaap Bosman is an experienced speaker at conferences and regularly facilitates discussions and workshops during partner retreats. His speaking topics include the economics of legal services, global strategy and business planning, pricing, the dynamics of a partner group and the impact of digital technology on the legal sector. Check availability