The productisation of law has already started - most firms just can't see it yet

There is a particular conversation I have had so many times I can almost script it. A managing partner tells me the firm is “watching the space closely” and will move “when law becomes a product.” The phrasing is always future tense. The productisation of law is a thing that is going to happen, to someone, at some point, probably to a competitor.

I have stopped arguing with the tense and started pointing at the present. Because the productisation of law has already started. It just hasn’t been announced, and it isn’t where most partners are looking for it.

It starts at the edges, not the centre

When people imagine law becoming a product, they picture the crown jewels: the bet-the-company litigation, the £40m acquisition, the regulatory advice that keeps a board out of prison. They look at that work, correctly conclude it cannot be reduced to software, and decide productisation is decades away.

That’s the wrong place to look. Productisation never begins in the centre of a profession. It begins at the edges, in the work that is high-volume, repeatable, and quietly resented. The NDA that gets marked up the same way every time. The standard data-room review. The first draft of a disclosure schedule. The thousandth real-estate certificate of title.

None of that is the firm’s identity. All of it is the firm’s revenue. And every one of those tasks is, right now, being turned into something that behaves more like a product than a service - a repeatable process with a defined input, a defined output, and a price that is starting to decouple from the hours it took.

A product is just a service that stopped being re-invented

I find people get tangled in the word “product.” They imagine it has to mean an app, a login, a subscription. It doesn’t. A product is just a service that the provider has stopped re-inventing from scratch every time.

By that definition, the productisation of a task has three stages, and you can place almost any piece of legal work on the ladder:

1. Bespoke. Every instance is handled as if it were the first. This is most legal work, most of the time, and it is where the billable hour feels natural because the effort genuinely is variable.
2. Templated. The firm has precedents, playbooks, a known-good way of doing it. The variability is now in the judgement, not the assembly. Most good firms reached this stage years ago and called it “knowledge management.”
3. Productised. The repeatable part is delivered by a system, the judgement sits on top, and the client increasingly buys an outcome rather than a quantity of attention.

The interesting firms are the ones quietly moving tasks from stage two to stage three, one workflow at a time. They are not waiting for “law” to become a product. They are productising a verb - reviewing, drafting, checking, disclosing - and leaving the noun alone.

Why firms can’t see it happening

If this is already underway, why does it feel like it isn’t?

Partly because productisation inside a law firm is structurally invisible. It doesn’t show up as a launch. It shows up as a matter that took eleven hours instead of thirty, which - under the billable model - looks on the page like a problem, not a breakthrough. The firm has built something genuinely valuable and its own accounting system reports it as lost revenue.

Partly because the people doing it don’t have the vocabulary. A senior associate who has spent a year refining a workflow so that a junior plus a tool can do what used to take three lawyers has built a product. Nobody in the building would call it that. They’d call it “being efficient,” and they would be slightly embarrassed about the hours it cost the matter.

And partly because the firms furthest ahead have every reason to keep quiet. If you have genuinely productised a category of work, your incentive is to keep charging the old price for the new cost for as long as the market lets you. Productisation, early on, looks exactly like margin. You don’t put margin in a press release.

The risk of pretending it’s still the future

The comfortable position is that there is time. That this is a 2030 problem, and the firm can keep watching the space.

The reason that position is dangerous is that productisation compounds. The firm that turns ten workflows into products this year doesn’t just save ten chunks of time. It learns how to do the turning - how to spot a productisable task, how to build the thin layer of judgement on top, how to price an outcome instead of an input, how to get fee-earners to actually use the thing. That capability is the real asset, and it is far harder to acquire than any individual tool.

So when a firm finally decides the future has arrived and goes looking to “do productisation,” it discovers the gap isn’t software. The software is buyable. The gap is the institutional muscle that the early movers have been building quietly for three years while everyone else watched the space.

What I’d do about it

If I were running a firm, I would not start with a strategy for the productisation of law. That’s the noun again, and it’s unactionable. I’d start by asking a much smaller question, in one practice group: which three tasks do our people do most often, resent most, and re-invent every time?

Then I’d productise those three. Not buy a platform - productise the tasks. Define the input and output. Build or buy the repeatable layer. Put the judgement on top where it belongs. Price one of them as an outcome and see what happens.

Do that, and you’ll discover the same thing the quiet firms already know: law doesn’t become a product in a single, announceable moment. It becomes a product one verb at a time, and the firms that win are simply the ones that started conjugating earlier.