Those three months gave me a lot of time to think and to experiment, and now that the dust has settled I wanted to write a little about why we founded Tacit Legal, our vision for it and, in later articles, our operational journey so far.

Why go on our own?

This is a question we have all been asked a lot. Sometimes in an inspired way, and sometimes in a way questioning our sanity.

The four of us share a belief that much of the UK legal industry is caught between a rock and a hard place.

There is a fierce war for talent being predominantly fought with money, clients do not generally feel like they get good value from their external advisors, and the up-and-coming generations of lawyer are increasingly looking for a more balanced life.

The mid-market is really feeling it. Salaries are only being pulled upward, clients are (in most cases rightly) unwilling to fund salary inflation on firms’ behalf, and young lawyers feel like they may as well go to a top-tier or American firm if they are worked any harder.

The only way that everyone can win is by finding a way to meaningfully reduce the cost of production. That may seem like a strange phrase to use, but there are parallels with the industrial revolution.

We are not just talking about implementing a bit of legal tech around the edges – it is not that easy. A lot of what we do as lawyers needs to be taken right back to the basics of people and process, and it can be hard to think like that, especially for things we rightly or wrongly believe are too complicated to be streamlined.

Change is hard, and it’s even harder in a “big law” environment where there is often significant technical or cultural debt. More specifically, the pace of change.

Yes, there are the “platform firms” that have made big strides in reducing the operating cost. But that model, which generally attracts more seasoned lawyers working on their own, does not address the cost of sale, or in other words, the how. Though that is not to say the operating cost should be left alone!

So, we wanted a blank piece of paper, where we can try new things, learn from them, and build the firm in a way that addresses those challenges from the ground up.

The Vision

Our vision is simple.

A boutique firm laser-focused on what we do best – commercial, technology, media and data protection – with a solution for a range of budgets and risk tolerances, each backed by an appropriate operating model.

The cost savings we make will be shared by our clients and our people. Fair pricing, and fair remuneration based on merit not location.

Our colleagues will from the minute they join experience a firm that is clearly trying to do things the right way – whether that be well-thought-out benefits, technology that makes processes a joy to follow, or business practices that just seem “right”.

Our clients – talent, procurement teams, scaling SMEs and larger corporates with in-house legal teams – will be able to get both bespoke advice and more “risk-relevant” services from a single vendor.

Our operational journey so far

We quickly realised that what we wanted to achieve was not going to be possible with entirely “off the shelf” software and processes. We could foresee a situation where buying “traditional” legal IT and services would hold us back from achieving what we want to, by locking us into processes and business practices which we would otherwise have eventually wanted to change.

In future articles, I’ll be writing about what that has meant in practice – what has been easy, what has been hard and what has worked well or not so well.

Keep an eye on the news & insights section of our website, or connect with one of us on LinkedIn to hear when we publish the next.