Commercial acumen
Understand the business’s objectives, pressures and risk appetite so advice helps someone make a decision.
Make the advice relevant.Research · Framework · Diagnostic
Legal expertise
is the baseline.
What comes next
is the differentiator.
The Modern Lawyer Framework is a practical model for how lawyers can provide greater value as technology changes legal work. It combines legal expertise with an understanding of business, better ways of working and the ability to help people act on advice.
Research · Reflection · PracticeLegal expertise. Broader contribution.
01 / Why this matters
Technology changes the work.
Lawyers can rethink the service.
More legal tasks can be supported by technology.
Research, drafting, document review and analysis are becoming faster and more accessible. That changes how legal work is produced and raises a question about what clients and stakeholders need from lawyers.
People still need help deciding what to do.
An accurate legal answer may not tell someone which risk matters most, which option fits their business or how to put the advice into practice. The framework explores how lawyers can build that broader service around their expertise.
02 / What the framework is
Legal expertise, connected
to business, systems and people.
The framework brings together four elements. Legal mastery is the foundation, supported by three complementary capabilities. Their value lies in how they work together.
Legal masteryCheck that the legal answer is sound, applies to the situation and makes its limits clear.
Systems thinking
Turn recurring legal questions into clear processes and tools, with boundaries and a route back to Legal.
Make good judgement reusable.Human intelligence
Understand people, communicate in ways they can use and build the trust that brings Legal into decisions earlier.
Make the advice usable.03 / Help test the framework
Grounded in research.
Refined through practice.
Ready to be tested further.
The framework draws on more than 75 research papers, industry reports and professional publications, and has been refined through six years of practice. The next step is to test its ideas and conclusions against the experiences of lawyers, clients and stakeholders.
The study explores which contributions people value most, where lawyers’ and clients’ views differ, and how technology is changing legal work and development priorities.
Try it in your own work
Start with one change.
The diagnostic helps you reflect on your approach across six practical areas and choose a development action to try.
Receive the research report.
Request a copy when the findings are published.
The framework / From idea to practice
Build on expertise.
Broaden the contribution.
A framework for combining sound legal judgement with business understanding, systems thinking and human intelligence. Explore what each element means, the shift it asks of lawyers and how to apply it.
Why these capabilities belong together
Each strengthens the others.
Accurate advice needs to fit the decision. A repeatable process needs sound judgement and clear boundaries. Both depend on people understanding and trusting how to use them. The framework brings these needs together.
- SoundLegal mastery
- RelevantCommercial acumen
- RepeatableSystems thinking
- UsableHuman intelligence
The foundation / Legal mastery
Make the judgement sound.
Legal mastery means applying the law accurately, knowing whether an answer fits the context, recognising its limits and identifying what has been missed. Technology can support the work; professional judgement remains essential.
From finding an answer to judging whether it is right for the situation.
Put it into practice
- Check the basis. Verify the relevant law, facts and assumptions.
- Test the fit. Ask whether the answer applies to this situation and what it leaves unresolved.
- Make limits clear. Explain uncertainty and identify when specialist input is needed.
Illustrative example: reviewing a draft
A technology-assisted draft may look complete. Review the legal basis, the factual assumptions and the issues it has not addressed before relying on it. Record any uncertainty that could change the advice.
Ask: “What would make this answer wrong or incomplete?”
01 / Commercial acumen
Make the judgement relevant.
Understand the business well enough to know what matters: its objectives, commercial pressures, risk appetite and the real consequences of the advice. Those priorities can change with the circumstances.
From identifying legal risks to judging their significance in context.
Structure advice around the decision
- Identify the real problem. What decision needs to be made?
- Explain why the risk matters. Translate the legal issue into its business consequence.
- Frame the options. What does each option offer, cost and require the organisation to accept?
- Make a recommendation. Connect it to the objective and explain the trade-offs.
Illustrative example: a supplier decision
When a supplier requests a longer recovery period after a service failure, first establish how long the business can operate without that service. Use that context to explain the consequence, available protections and options, then recommend a course of action.
The contribution is a decision the stakeholder can make, with a clear understanding of the risk.
Try this: Begin your next piece of advice with the decision required and your recommendation.
02 / Systems thinking
Make good judgement travel further.
Use process, design and technology to make sound legal judgement available beyond a single interaction. Identify what genuinely requires a lawyer, what can be standardised and when exceptions need to return to Legal.
From task efficiency to system design.
Turn a recurring problem into a decision pathway
- Define the trigger. What starts the process?
- Assign ownership and checks. Who acts, and what needs to be verified?
- Capture the decision logic. What pathway should be followed?
- Set the safe default. What can happen within the agreed boundaries?
- Define escalation. What deviation requires Legal to step back in?
In practice: a recurring low-risk request
Capture the usual checks in a playbook or workflow. Let routine requests follow a defined pathway, with clear boundaries and exceptions referred to Legal. Technology can help deliver or automate the process.
Systems thinking is the capability. Technology helps put the system to work.
Try this: Look at the last five requests to Legal. Choose one recurring question and map its decision pathway.
03 / Human intelligence
Help people trust and act on advice.
Understand the person behind the question, adapt how you communicate and build trust through everyday interactions. Advice has limited value if people cannot use it or only involve Legal when it is too late to help.
From delivering advice to making it understood, trusted and usable.
Make the advice work for the person
- Understand the pressure. What are they trying to achieve, worried about or not saying?
- Adapt to the audience. Give the level of detail and explanation they need to make the decision.
- Build trust consistently. Listen, use language people understand and follow through on commitments.
In practice: one judgement, different audiences
An executive may need the consequence and decision in one sentence. An analytical team may need the reasoning. A non-legal stakeholder may need a clear explanation of what this means for them and what to do next.
Keep the underlying judgement consistent while adapting how it is communicated.
Try this: Before giving advice, ask what the recipient needs to understand or do next.
The intended result
Better decisions, at scale.
Combined deliberately, these capabilities aim to produce advice that fits the business, systems that apply sound judgement repeatedly, and relationships that help people act with confidence.
The practical question is: what becomes possible because Legal is involved?
A framework to use and test.
The framework draws on practice and a review of more than 75 research papers, industry reports and professional publications. These are proposed contributions, not proven outcomes of the framework. The research compares what lawyers and the people they serve value, including where their experiences challenge the proposition.
The Modern Lawyer Study
What do lawyers value?
What do their clients value?
We are testing how lawyers understand their own value and whether that matches what business professionals actually value in legal support.
Listen to both sides
of the advice.
The study brings together in-house and private-practice lawyers, business professionals, and legal operations and technology specialists.
It examines perceived value, experiences of AI and the capabilities people believe legal professionals will need. You do not need to use AI to contribute.
Value provided.
Value experienced.
Do legal service providers and their clients agree on what makes a contribution useful?
Technology use.
Everyday experience.
What benefits, barriers and changes to their work do participants report when using AI and legal technology?
Current practice.
Future priorities.
Which capabilities do people think deserve more attention as legal work changes?
Your perspective belongs in the study
Help test what makes lawyers valuable.
Tell us what makes legal support valuable in your experience. Your perspective will inform the next iteration of the framework, including where it needs to change. Read the participant information before taking part.
Inside the study / Explore the questions behind the research
Purpose of the study
What makes a lawyer valuable to the people and organisations they serve and how might that change as AI becomes more capable?
The Modern Lawyer Study compares perspectives from lawyers, business professionals, and legal operations and technology specialists to identify agreement, reveal differences and inform the framework. It explores value today, reported technology benefits and future capability needs. Technical expertise remains part of the inquiry, including whether it continues to distinguish excellent lawyers.
What the research is testing
- What creates value now? The outcomes, capabilities and ways of delivering support that participants prioritise.
- Where do perspectives align or differ? Lawyers’ assumptions about stakeholder priorities compared with business respondents’ own views.
- Where, if anywhere, does support fall short? Reported unmet needs, friction, barriers and desired improvements.
- What may change over the next three to five years? Expectations about future strengths, alongside reported uses and benefits of AI and legal technology today.
- Which capabilities warrant development? Participants’ perceived gaps and priorities for change.
The shared future-capability questions focus on valuable in-house lawyers. These are expectations, not predictions proven by the study or assessments of actual skill.
Define value before measuring it
Value means a meaningful outcome for the recipient, considered alongside the cost, effort, risk and alternatives involved. We distinguish what legal support achieves from the capabilities and ways of working that make it possible.
| Concept | What it means here |
|---|---|
| Value | The benefit the recipient perceives, relative to cost, effort, risk and alternatives. |
| Outcome | What improves: a better decision, progress, managed risk or an avoided problem. |
| Capability | What enables that contribution: expertise, judgement or commercial understanding. |
| Delivery | How support is experienced: clarity, responsiveness, relationships and usability. |
| Differentiation | What makes an adviser preferable to alternatives or worth instructing again. |
| Visibility | Whether evidence of contribution reaches people and helps them understand or use it. |
The questionnaire captures perceived priorities and experiences. It does not calculate the economic value of a lawyer or independently verify business outcomes.
Why business professionals are included
We apply business frameworks to the future of legal services, with design thinking as a core framework. Design thinking starts with understanding the people a service is intended to help, then uses those insights to define problems and shape better solutions. Here, that means listening directly to the clients and colleagues lawyers serve and using their perspectives to inform the framework.
Business respondents describe what they value, where support falls short and what would help them make decisions. Comparing these views across responsibility levels helps keep the framework grounded in different users’ needs, while recognising lawyers’ independent professional judgement.
How the research relates to the framework
The framework supplies questions to investigate, rather than conclusions to confirm. Any published findings should show the respondent mix, analysis method and limitations, including evidence that challenges the model. No empirical findings are presented on this website.
Is the diagnostic part of the research survey?
They are separate experiences. The Jotform survey collects research responses under its participant information. The diagnostic is a reflection tool: its answers are calculated in your browser and are not submitted as research responses.
Follow the research.
Ask a question, receive updates or request the report when it is ready.
The person behind the question
I kept coming back
to one question.
I’m Bianca de Souza, a solicitor, in-house legal counsel and a curious mind.
My work sits at the intersection of law, business, risk, technology and the people who ultimately have to make decisions.
And across all of it, I kept noticing the same thing:
Knowing the law is essential. But knowing the law is not the same as creating value.
The Modern Lawyer Framework began as an attempt to understand what comes next.
Connect on LinkedIn ↗
From practice to question
The work made the question difficult to ignore.
In-house practice puts you unusually close to the consequences of legal advice. You see what happens after the memo is written: whether a decision gets made, whether a process works, whether a risk is actually managed and whether the business can move forward.
My work across commercial contracting, data protection, compliance and emerging technology made me increasingly interested in that space between legal expertise and organisational outcomes.
As AI becomes increasingly capable of supporting research, drafting, review and analysis, that question becomes more important, not less.
If access to the legal answer becomes easier, where does the lawyer create distinctive value?
That question became the starting point for the Modern Lawyer Framework.
- Solicitor of England & Wales
- In-house legal counsel
- In-house Legal Counsel of the Year 2025
- TEDx speaker
- Featured by The Law Society
Commercial law / Data & privacy / Compliance / AI & legal innovation
Law taught me the rules.
Practice taught me what happens next.
The Modern Lawyer Framework is teaching me how to take that further.
Ideas in public
Continuing the conversation
beyond the framework.
The Law Society feature
Why modern lawyers must think differently about technology, commercial awareness and people skills
Read the feature ↗TEDx
Jump Off Your Metaphorical Cliff
Watch the talk ↗Legal Geek 2026
The Modern Lawyer Framework
London · 14 October 2026
Vinyl Stage · around midday
Contact us
Good questions deserve
a conversation.
Ask about the research, share a perspective or connect with Bianca de Souza. Here is where to find us.
Join the Research ↗Ask about the study.
Questions about participation, the framework or the research? Email Bianca directly.
research@modernlawyerframework.comStart a conversation.
For speaking, collaboration or anything else about the Modern Lawyer Framework, get in touch.
hello@modernlawyerframework.comAdd Bianca de Souza.
Follow the thinking as it develops, share your experience and continue the conversation.
Connect with Bianca on LinkedIn ↗Hear what we learn.
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