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

The playbook that supported the legal industry is crumbling! There is a version of this story that ends well. The legal profession has navigated disruption before, reinvented itself in fits and starts, and emerged each time with its fundamentals intact. Revenue kept climbing. Profits per equity partner reached levels that would have seemed fictional twenty years ago. The model worked exceptionally well. The model has been exceptionally robust. Few industries run the same playbook for five decades without fundamental revision, yet the legal profession has done exactly that. The partners running firms today have never practised under any other system, which is precisely the danger: a model that has always worked is almost impossible to recognise as a model on borrowed time. On the surface everything still looks healthy. Revenue is up. Profit per equity partner is up. The goose is still laying golden eggs. What the numbers do not reveal is that the playbook has quietly expired, and that the two structural advantages it rests on, the billable hour and the leverage pyramid, are both now in AI's path. How the model worked The billable hour became the dominant model from the 1950s onward. Before that, lawyers charged by the matter: a judgement call about the value of the work and what the client could absorb. The shift to hourly billing transferred the risk of inefficiency from the firm to the client. The longer a task took, the more the firm earned. In a growing market where clients kept accepting rate increases, no one looked too hard at the mathematics. Leverage did the rest. At its most fundamental, leverage is the ratio of associates to equity partners. A firm extracts the surplus between what associates cost and what they bill. The wider that spread, the higher the profit per equity partner. For as long as the legal market kept growing, the model was self-reinforcing. More clients, more associates, higher rates, more profit. Firms perfected the execution of this model over decades. The Am Law 100 generated $178.95 billion in revenue in 2025. A handful of firms now report profit per equity partner above ten million dollars. The model was not broken. It was exceptionally well-tuned, for the conditions it was designed for. The wall Those conditions are ending. The legal market has been largely stagnant in real terms for several years. Revenue growth has come almost entirely from rate increases, and that lever is not infinite. AI is now attacking the foundation of the pyramid directly. The base of the pyramid, document review, drafting, research, execution, is precisely the work that AI is compressing fastest. The time required for high-volume document review has already fallen by an order of magnitude on platforms in active use. First drafts, due diligence, regulatory research: all moving in the same direction. The arithmetic is uncomfortable. A firm that becomes more efficient while continuing to bill by the hour generates less revenue from the same volume of work. Costs rise by the cost of the technology. Profit falls. The efficiency the technology delivers flows directly to the client through the billing model, with no mechanism to capture it as margin. The firm that holds on to time-based billing as AI absorbs more of the work is turning its own technology investment into a liability. The business model that built the modern law firm is running straight into this wall. The new playbook What replaces it? Three things, in order of importance. First, a precise understanding of value. The TGO Value Matrix© maps legal work on two axes: the return on investment the client realises from the advice, and the degree to which that advice is available from equivalent providers elsewhere in the market. Work that generates a high return and requires genuinely scarce expertise commands a premium that has nothing to do with hours billed. Work that is necessary but generates no particular return for the client, and can be done equally well by many lawyers, will be priced as a commodity. As AI levels execution quality across the market, the firms whose work sits in the high-return, scarce-expertise part of the matrix are positioned to defend a premium. Those building revenue through volume at the commodity end face a structural problem that no rate increase will solve. Second, the ability to monetise efficiency. The entire pricing infrastructure of the profession, billing systems, rate cards, client expectations, performance metrics for associates and partners, is built around time. Moving to value-based or fixed-fee arrangements requires data on past mandates, project management discipline, and a willingness to let the firm capture the benefit of being fast rather than being penalised for it. Most firms are years away from having the capabilities this requires. The partners who will lead this transition are not the ones who have spent their careers perfecting time management. They are the ones who understand what the work is actually worth. Third, and most important of all, people. Last week's article explored this in detail. AI is the great equaliser. Any firm can buy the same tools. What cannot be equalised is the quality of the people using them. The research behind the 7-Core Dimensions© showed that 83% of what clients praise in their best lawyers has nothing to do with legal knowledge. Business understanding. Creativity. Relationship depth. Judgement under pressure. These are precisely the qualities AI cannot replicate, and precisely those it will most powerfully amplify in those who have them. Why now The billable hour is profitable for the partners who have spent twenty years building practices on it. The incentive to be the firm that moves first is weaker than the incentive to let someone else go first and see what happens. The pyramid is embedded in how firms train and develop people. Changing it means redesigning the development path, the pricing model, and the compensation system simultaneously. None of it is a simple project. None of this means the change will not happen. It means the firms that choose to lead it rather than wait for the market to force it will have a head start that compounds. The old playbook ran for five decades. The new one is being written now, whether firms are writing it or not. The ones that understand they are on borrowed time are the ones already at the desk. 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

September 2023 it was announced that three Kirland & Ellis partners would move to Paul Weiss. According to people close to the matter, the trio would each receive $20 million in annual compensation at their new firm. This is quite exceptional as today at Am Law 25 firms, only a handful of partners have comp in excess of $20 million. The news will undoubtedly leave a number of partners elsewhere in town feeling all at once very unhappy and under-rewarded. Modified lockstep For compensating its partners, most firms today have a system that includes elements of merit based compensation as well as seniority based. Some well-known firms with pure lockstep have introduced merit based differentiators in order to retain and attract star partners. What the modified lockstep looks like varies wildly. Most firms have adopted a set of – sometimes very detailed and complicated – rules for calculating each partner’s profit share. Others involve a compensation committee or have the managing partner decide. Compensation for yardstick Why is partner compensation such a hot topic in many law firms? Partners in business law firms invariably earn more than 99% of the population, so why not just be happy with it and focus on clients and family? One reason is that partner compensation is used as a yardstick for the success of the firm. Partners always compare PEP with other firms, seeing a close competitor have higher comp will trigger a heated debate on the firm’s strategy and sometimes results in star partners leaving. Also the opposite is true: a highly competitive partner compensation is a prerequisite for lateral hiring of rainmakers, which in turn could help the firm become even more successful. This is what’s happening at Paul Weiss. Which compensation model is best? Ideally in a firm, all partners are equally successful in the market and are happy to cooperate with each other. If the bandwidth between partners is narrow, there will be no need for merit based differentiation and lockstep will help avoid partners starting to compete with each other. Each partner will always act with the interest of the firm in mind. Unfortunately there is no ideal world in which each partner is equally successful and also partners are inclined to prioritize self-interest before firm-interest. This will even happen in lockstep firms as each partner is under pressure to meet his/her target. Partners start monopolizing client relationships and are trying to get files in which also other partners are active, to be administered under their name. Now the solidarity which underpins the lockstep is compromised, cracks will start to appear. Collaboration will suffer and star partners will demand action against slackers. One could also start from the other end assuming that self-interest is the norm and make the compensation fully merit based. This could even go as far as partners charging internally for helping out in another partner’s file. Such ‘eat what you kill’ compensation systems will allow for a very large bandwidth in partner performance, but provide no incentive for collaboration. Fully merit based systems also give young new partners a difficult start as in order to make an income they will have little alternative than working in other partners files at a reduced rate and without quickly growing a client base of their own. Since both lockstep and ‘eat what you kill’ have their problems, it comes as no surprise the hybrid modified lockstep has become the most popular. In reality the modified lockstep suffers from the same issues: collaboration remains an issue and the weak partners irritate the star partners. “There is no evidence to support that compensation impacts partner performance” Carrot and stick As stated, in our practice we have seen a great many different partner compensation models. Most of them have a few things in common: they favor a small group of partners and they aim to influence partner behavior. Let’s examen both in more detail. Mostly compensations systems favor the more senior partners with an established practice. One argument could be the firm must prevent such rainmakers to leave. While there certainly is some truth in that, it also creates problems, notably when it comes to succession. Also this group is typically also involved in the leadership of the firm whether it be formal or informal. Granting themselves the largest cut can in a way be self-serving. And I have not even mentioned ‘origination credits’, which also disproportionately favors this group. Over there years we have done multiple in depth analysis and never have we found any evidence that individual partner performance and behavior can be significantly influenced by compensation. Never have we seen a weak partner show better performance after his/her compensation was cut. Receiving less money will not transform a weak partner into a strong partner. This is similar for other aspects that are part of a partner compensation formula: rewarding collaboration hardly increases real world collaboration. Partners that feel comfortable collaborating will collaborate regardless and those that prefer to work on their own will continue to do so even it this means they will miss out on a small percentage of their compensation. As a rule of thumb: partner compensation is not the right tool to change the status quo. Only culture can do that. The bigger picture Partner compensation is one of those topics that we come across a lot when working with our clients. Many law firms spend disproportionate amounts of time discussing how to divide the profit among the partners. The problem I see is that having lengthy conversations on how to distribute profit does not make the firm as such more profitable. These discussions are just inward looking and a time and emotions consuming energy drain. We have found there are typically two triggers for discussing partner comp. The first is heavy lifters complaining about partners that seem to enjoy a free ride and don’t put in the effort. The other trigger is the wish to change partner behavior, typically this means stimulating collaboration. As mentioned before, there is no evidence that partner compensation changes partner performance. Taking away money from a weak partner will just legitimize their weakness. Giving more money to a top performer will only keep him/her happy for so long. We have looked in depth at lateral movements of partners across a number of markets. In some markets lateral movements are common in other markets they remain rare and are frowned upon. One thing partners that move firm have in common: the primary motif for moving is rarely money. Typically, they have lost confidence in their firm’s strategy or have developed cultural or interpersonal issues. A partner that likes the firm culture, gets along with other partners and feels supported, is unlikely to leave for more money. Using PEP as a yardstick for performance also has its flaws. Generally we at TGO Consulting prefer to look at profit margin, revenue per lawyer and a number of other indicators more relevant to a firm’s performance. Bottomline Law firms are well advised to have a permanent focus on performance and profitability on a firm level and not so much on an individual partner level. Partners should spend less time discussing internal matters and more time identifying and sharing business opportunities. Firms should invest in creating or maintain a result driven, inclusive, collaborative culture. Partner compensation should not disproportionally favor a small group and should be supportive for young partners who are still developing their practice. Any system that meets these criteria will do. Writing this article I noticed there is so much to cover when it comes to partner compensation, that it is impossible to squeeze it all in 1000 words. Potentially this is a good topic for my next book, what do you think? Want to read more? Continue on book website👇

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