legaltech

Actionstep Survey: 2025 Roadmap for Australian Midsize Law Firms: Priorities, Challenges & Opportunities

As we navigate 2025, Australian midsize law firms find themselves at a pivotal crossroads—balancing client expectations, talent retention and the promise (and pitfalls) of technology. The recently released 2025 Australian Midsize Law Firm Priorities Report by Actionstep offers a deep dive into what’s shaping the future for these firms.

Here’s s summary of what you need to know from the Report—and how your firm can stay ahead.

🎯 Client Satisfaction: The Cornerstone of Growth

It’s clear—client satisfaction is king.
71% of midsize firms rank it as their top priority for protecting and growing revenue. But it’s not just about delivering legal outcomes; it’s about building trust-based relationships, offering personalised service and consistently exceeding expectations.

Interestingly, firms are focusing more on deepening relationships with existing clients rather than chasing new business. In fact, 37% see expanding existing client accounts as their primary growth strategy for 2025.

✅ Takeaway: If your firm isn’t investing in client experience, you’re leaving growth on the table.

👥 Talent Retention: Your Secret Weapon

While technology grabs headlines, midsize firms know that people drive performance.

  • 59% of firms highlight attracting and retaining talent as a top strategic priority.
  • Engaging work, leadership and firm culture outrank pay as key reasons employees stay.

However, when employees consider leaving, pay and remuneration become the decisive factor. This signals a clear message: while meaningful work keeps people engaged, competitive compensation keeps them committed.

✅ Takeaway: Create a workplace where talent thrives—offer challenging work, clear career paths and ensure your pay structures remain competitive.

💻 Technology & Automation: The Untapped Advantage

Despite recognising efficiency challenges, midsize firms remain cautious adopters of automation and AI:

  • Only 38% are actively using automation tools.
  • Just 5% have reached AI maturity.
  • Cybersecurity concerns and data privacy remain top barriers.

There’s also a noticeable gap in digital client experience. While firms excel in personalised, human-centric service, only 41% feel confident in their digital touchpoints like client portals and automated communications.

✅ Takeaway: Embrace technology—not to replace people, but to empower them. Automation can reduce workloads, freeing your team to focus on high-value client interactions.

🔐 Cybersecurity: More Than Just IT’s Problem

With client trust on the line, cybersecurity is non-negotiable. Yet, the biggest risk isn’t technology—it’s human error. Over 63% of firms cite staff behaviour (think password sharing, weak authentication practices) as their top vulnerability.

✅ Takeaway: Build a security-first culture. Regular training, robust protocols, and smart tools like multi-factor authentication are essential to protect both your firm and your clients.

🏆 5 Strategies for Midsize Law Firm Success in 2025

  1. Acknowledge Tech Scepticism: Start small, demonstrate wins, and build confidence in automation.
  2. Prioritise Efficiency: Use automation to tackle time constraints and free up your team for strategic work.
  3. Enhance the Client Experience: Leverage digital tools to complement your personal service.
  4. Strengthen Cybersecurity: Focus on both technology and employee awareness.
  5. Put People First: Foster engaging work environments and ensure competitive compensation.

Final Thoughts

2025 presents both challenges and opportunities for Australia’s midsize law firms. Those that blend human expertise with smart technology, prioritise client relationships, and invest in their people will be best positioned to thrive in an increasingly competitive market.

Is your firm ready to seize the moment?

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Report: Top growth strategies for law firms for the next three years

Last week saw the publication of the 14th edition of CommBank’s Legal Market Pulse report for 2021. What I recall starting out as a quarterly, then half-yearly, report, now looks to be permanently set as an annual publication (feel free to do a search of my previous posts on the CommBank report to see some of the history behind this).

Anyhow, the overriding message of this year’s Report is that the pandemic had little affect on overall profit growth at most Australian law firms (probably as a result of dramatically reduced costs). And with year-on-year median 12.1% growth in profit, on first look it appears that the profession is going great guns. Which, as someone who advises to the profession, is great news!

But where do law firms think growth will come from over the next 3 years?

How Australian law firms are looking to grow over the next 3 years?

Looking at page 11 of the Report, Australian law firms will primarily look at the following 11 ways to grow their firm’s revenue over the next 3 years:

  1. Marketing and business development activities
  2. Lateral hires from competitor firms
  3. Adopting new technologies
  4. Building/expanding referral networks
  5. Cross- and up-selling strategies
  6. Increasing fees
  7. New models of service delivery
  8. M&A activity
  9. Graduate intake
  10. Boutique/niche practices
  11. Diversified or non-traditional legal services
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Survey: The 6 most important criteria in-house counsel consider when evaluating law firms

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In last week’s post I looked at the Top 5 Reasons Clients Switch Firms as recently reported by Wolters Kluner. Conveniently this same Survey also reports on the ‘6 most important criteria in-house consider when evaluating law firms‘ – so here’s a quick look at what they are:

The in-house view

1.  Specialization

In recent years I have heard it said on a number of occasions that in-house counsel no longer differentiate lawyers/law firms they ask to do work for them on the issue of ‘specialisation’ – it is a given that you know your topic and this merely gives you a seat at the table.

The results of this Survey clearly show that impression to be wrong – specialisation (at 23%) remains top of mind to in-house.

Unfortunately the term used in the Survey is ‘specialisation’ as opposed to ‘niche’. While there may not appear to be much of a difference between these two terms, for many there is and I would be interested to see the results if this was an option.

2.  Technology

The fact that a lawyer’s ability to use technology ranks equal top (23%) with specialisation shouldn’t be too much of a surprise in a survey conducted on technology adaptation in law firms.

That said, the use of technology in collaboration efforts should raise some eye-brows as it clearly shows, in my opinion, further evidence that in-house counsel want shared platforms and that knowledge sharing among law firms who continue to develop stand-alone technology platforms are likely wasting their money.

3.  Ability to understand client needs

At first the fact that ‘ability to understand client needs‘ came third in the list at 19% surprised me.

But then I thought: not many clients truly know what their needs are – maybe this question would have been better phrased as: ‘Understanding our business/sector?’

4.  Price – and 6.  AFAs

Price gets 16% of the vote. AFAs gets 9%. If you combined them, they get 25%. And would top the table.

But they are not combined.

They are seperate.

Which make me wonder: Why?

Also: if your law firm is really offering value – price, whether it be hourly rates or AFAs, would be the last thing that matters.

5.  Process innovation

I found the fact that process innovation only got 10% of the vote interesting, because if you read the rest of this survey a core message is that law firms need to get better at demonstrating efficiencies.

This result somewhat undermines that message.

The law firm view

I was pleasantly surprised how consistent the law firm view was to that of their in-house clients.

Of course there will always be one significant difference of opinions between law firms and their clients (in the law firm’s mind) as to why they were chosen: ‘Price’.

And what this Survey shows, as many before it have, is that law firms need (finally) to start moving away from that needle.

As always, these just represent my thoughts and always interested to hear your views.

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25 Legal Podcasts I Listen To

Over the weekend my attention was drawn to a post by Lauren Lee on Simple Legal titled ‘The 20 Best Legal Podcasts to Listen to in 2020‘. Lauren’s list is pretty comprehensive, if not a little US-based. Anyhow, it got me to thinking what podcasts I listen to here in Australia.

So here’s my list (in no order of preference – other than how they have been listed in my Podcasts app):

  1. In Seclusion with Greg Lambert
  2. Ditching Hourly with Jonathan Stark
  3. The Thought Leadership Project with Jay Harrington & Tom Nixon
  4. Doing Law Differently with Lucy Dickens
  5. The Law Firm Marketing Minute with Marc Cerniglia and Daniel Decker
  6. The Legal Ops Podcast with Alex Rosenrauch and Elliot Leibu
  7. Reinventing Professionals with Ari Kaplan
  8. Impact Pricing with Mark Stiving
  9. Law Next with Robert Ambrogi
  10. Legal Speak by Law.com
  11. The Kennedy-Mighell Report with Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell
  12. The Soul of Enterprise with Ron Baker and Ed Kless
  13. Size 10 1/2 Boots CoffeeCast with Doug Mcpherson
  14. Duct Tape Marketing with John Jantsch
  15. Lawyerist Podcast with  Sam Glover, Aaron Street, and Stephanie Everet
  16. Pricing is Positioning with Paul Klein
  17. Accounting Influencers withRob Brown
  18. The Happy Lawyer Happy Life Podcast with Clarissa J Rayward
  19. The Geek in Review with Greg Lambert & Marlene Gebauer
  20. The Legal Toolkit with Scott Wallingford and Aaron Pierce
  21. Innovating Leadership with Maureen Metcalf
  22. PSM: Professional Services Marketing with Josh Miles and David Lecours
  23. The Legalpreneurs Sandbox with Centre for Legal Innovation
  24. Beyond Billables with Michael Bromley
  25. LMA Podcast

Some other industry related podcasts I listen to include:

Those of you who subscribe to my weekly digest will have seen last week that I’m now also subscribed to a few industry related YouTube feeds that are also worth keeping an eye on.

Anyhow, most of the podcasts in my list run from 30 minutes to an hour long. I’d suggest listening to them on your morning walk while we are in lock-down or on your commute once we return to normality.

And if you have any podcasts you listen to that you think I should be listing to, let me know!

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“A lawyer’s time is the only commodity that we have to sell”

Earlier today I listened to a podcast on respected legal technologist expert/journalist/speaker Ari Kaplan’s Reinventing Professionals from May 2, 2019 in which he spoke with Josh Taylor, an attorney and the lead content strategist at Smokeball, a practice management software platform that started out life here in Australia and now appears to be mainly located in Chicago (although retains a presence in Sydney and Melbourne).

The first seven minutes (out of nine) I was entertained and thought were good.  But two minutes and twelve seconds from the end Ari throws out his last question (my transcript follows so sorry for any errors) to Josh:

Where do you see the use of technology in solo practices and small firms headed?

And Josh responds:

One thing that we struggle with so much, and I have saved it to the end here Ari instead of mentioning it as a pain-point upfront, the main part of the small law practice that we see people failing at day after day is accurately tracking their time and either on the the extreme cheating a client by over estimating, which is very rare, more likely and more often we see small law firms cheating themselves by under valuing every minute they have; when I go around speaking to bar associations around the country I always say “you know a lawyer’s time is the only commodity that we have to sell, we don’t make a thousand widgets in a minute that we can then sell for the same price, we have minutes in a day that is the only thing that we can sell out to our clients” because we cannot double bill people so to value and track time accurately I think is where legal tech is going to start leading the way…

Leaving aside the whole time-based billing versus value-based billing discussion, even if you only believe in time-based billing (cost-plus or however that looks) and never want to entertain the notion of any kind of alternative pricing method, to say:

a lawyer’s time is the only commodity that we have to sell

is so far removed from reality it’s not funny.

What a lawyer’s ‘commodity’ is, is the knowledge they have acquired, the experience they acquired to be able to apply that knowledge to the situation their client is facing, and the insight to do this in a valuable and respectable way.

Regardless of how you bill – as a lawyer that is the only commodity you have to sell.

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Are law firm structures moving from ‘pyramids’ to ‘rockets’?

The graph below, from slide 19 of the latest Investec ‘LegalTech & NewLaw update’ (April 2019), caught my attention last week:

rockets

Until reading Investec‘s report I had heard of law firms moving away from the ‘pyramid structure’ to both ‘inverse pyramid structures’ and ‘diamond structures‘ post the GFC in 2008, I had also read/heard of Peter Connor’s excellent ‘The T-shaped In-house Lawyer™’, but I had never heard of a ‘rocket‘ structure.

And you know what, I like it. Well worth some further thought.

Your thoughts – have you seen something like this before?

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Which kinds of businesses are most threatening to your firm’s future?

The December/January edition of Briefing magazine includes a supplementary report looking at the Legal IT Landscapes 2019. It’s a very enjoyable read, and includes the following graphic (answering the question from which the title of this blog is taken):

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What this indicates is that despite my having blogged about this issue as far back as September 2017 (‘Do you know who your competitors are?‘) senior managers of law firms still hold that other law firms like theirs are the greatest threat to their ongoing commercial success (at 26%).

As I wrote back then,

With the level of work that clients are now taking back in-house, or not bothering to do at all, they are without doubt the “overwhelming competitive threat” to the current law firm business model. And, this is not cyclical but structural.

Crucially, understanding this is of paramount importance if firms wish to survive the next 5, 10, 15 years. Because it reshapes everything we do. How we try and win work. The type of work we are trying to win. And even the nature of the relationship we have with our client.

In the long term it will determine the way we measure and reward. It will dictate how we charge, and it will determine whether we succeed or fail.

and I still hold now, this view is misplaced at best, and out and out wrong at worst.

As the following quote taken directly from the National Profile of Solicitors 2016 report (most recent I could find) published by the Law Society of New South Wales, in Australia the seriousness of the threat that in-house legal teams have on  the viability of your firm’s future success should not be underestimated:

Legal employment sectors are shifting. The great majority of Australian solicitors continue to work in private practice, with 69% employed in a law firm. However, the proportion of solicitors working in private practice has dropped from 75% to 69% over the last five years. This is due to a significant growth in the number of solicitors working in the corporate sector and government.

Between 2011 and 2016, there was a 59% increase in the number of solicitors working in the corporate sector, compared to a 17% increase working in the private sector.

Let that sink in for a second: a 59% increase in the number of solicitors working in the corporate sector [in Australia] over a 5 year period post the GFC.

Even coming from a relatively low baseline, that’s a staggering shift (indeed, some may even argue seismic)!

But ask senior management of law firms and only 10% will tell you that “in-house/client” is a business that is most threatening to their firm’s business.

Misguided pershaps?

As always, would be interested in your thoughts, views, feedback.

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