Last year I was asked to sign off a loan extension for £1m ($1.4m) for a business I’m involved in. It was a UK-government Covid loan with standard, non-negotiable terms. Everything had been previously agreed however, the bank insisted that we take legal advice and that advice (to check the reams of paper) cost a fat £15,000. 

To put that in context it is £235 more than Top Gear’s famously ‘reasonably priced car’, the Dacia Sandero (at £14,765 brand new). That is to say, it’s a lot for absolutely nothing.

This is exactly the sort of legal work that will be blown away in the first wave of AI. Anyone who has used Claude in their work will know that it is exceptionally accurate and much faster than its human equivalent in this sort of work. I work in software and it’s exactly the same for us by the way, so I’m definitely not crowing. But that does not mean we can ignore simple truths.

So where does that leave the law firm.

For the complex work, the relationships and negotiation, pulling together nuanced teams of specialists, I think there is a consensus that that will remain and indeed become more important. The technical expertise itself less so, though there will surely be exceptions.

In other words, the point person for work will likely become even more important. Business Development and Marketing will be critical. Presently law firms spend far less on marketing than any other B2B industry (somewhere between 0.5% and 5% according to the ALM in 2018 - somewhat out of date but the point stands) . If you add in the cost of the impressive premises and the BD teams it might expand a bit but it’s still absolutely trifling if you look at other industries at around 10% or more.

The rise of GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) - the art of getting in to the AI summaries in Google, OpenAI and Claude - makes thought leadership even more important. They are looking for trustworthiness and clear concise, quotable knowledge to answer their customers questions which absolutely cannot happen if you do not have a web presence. 

The firms that will thrive are those that treat marketing not as a support function but as a growth engine. The window to build a distinctive, visible presence before AI reshapes client buying behaviour is closing faster than most managing partners appreciate. We have a maxim at Passle - the best time to start your thought leadership journey was 5 years ago and the second best time is today.

From the client's perspective. If the routine legal work is increasingly handled by AI, the question a GC or CFO will ask is no longer "which firm has the best technical capability?" — they largely assume competence. The question becomes "which firm do I trust, whose thinking do I follow, whose partners feel like they understand my world?" That is a relationship and reputation question. And reputation, in 2026, is built through visible expertise: the articles, the commentary, the podcasts, the LinkedIn posts that appear when a potential client, or an AI summary engine, goes looking.

The irony is rich. AI will commoditise much of the billable work that currently funds law firm revenue. The antidote to that commoditisation is to invest, seriously, in the thing that cannot be commoditised: the human expert with a distinctive point of view, consistently making themselves known to the right people. That means marketing budgets need to move from the current 2–3% of revenue towards the B2B services norm of around 10%. And it means every partner who complains they are too busy to write needs to reconsider, because the busyness they are protecting may not be there in five years.

The Dacia Sandero moment is coming for a lot of legal work. The firms that will be fine are the ones building the relationships now that mean clients call them first, not because they Googled "corporate lawyer," but because they already feel like they know you.