Trainees are as intelligent as the rainmaker partners in their team. Same grades. Same university. Same ability to learn. The difference between them isn't intelligence, it's experience.
Every conference promises revolution, every LinkedIn post mourns another extinct job title and every managing partner is apparently "embracing AI".
Meanwhile the firms actually changing the game are doing something considerably less glamorous.
They're redesigning their approach to people.
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For decades the profession has worshipped hard-won experience with almost religious devotion. Survive enough midnight contract reviews, complete enough NDAs and you earn the right to progress to the next level.
It's an oddly inefficient way to train intelligent people.
Ian doesn't buy it.
His own career was anything but preordained. A sporting injury diverted him into law, specifically construction litigation which lasted approximately four weeks before an MBO partner rescued him. During that time business development strategy involved reading local newspapers and cold-calling distressed companies.
Buried inside the old ways sat a principle that's aged remarkably well: clients choose people, not process.
That belief carried him from Eversheds to Clifford Chance, through White & Case and eventually into building Perkins Coie's London office around a proposition that feels almost unfashionably simple.
Train people faster. Trust them earlier. Stop confusing experience with intelligence.
They're not the same thing.
Law romanticises hardship.
Trainee endures endless mark-ups. Associate delivers against impossible deadlines. Senior associate navigates partnership politics. Eventually the survivors emerge slightly traumatised but oddly defensive of the process.
Ian treats that logic with scepticism.
If pilots use simulators and athletes spend countless hours training away from match day then why should lawyers make expensive mistakes in front of clients?
Instead of assuming juniors must slowly climb a predetermined ladder, the model becomes accelerated exposure. Simulated transactions. On-demand learning. Gamified training. Avatar coaching. Business literacy from day one.
The objective isn't simply producing technically competent lawyers.
It's producing commercially useful ones.
Few words make lawyers as uncomfortable as "sales".
It conjures images of motivational seminars and gurus explaining funnel optimisation over bad coffee.
Ian sees something much less theatrical.
Growing up around the family chippy taught him the only business lesson that really matters: differentiation. Customers passed three competitors before reaching them.
Law is no different.
Technology will narrow the gap between exceptional advice and merely good advice. Playbooks will improve consistency. AI will eliminate repetition. Documentation will become faster, cheaper and increasingly standardised.
The technical moat shrinks.
Which leaves something far harder to automate.
Trust.
Not profile. Not conference panels. Not endless thought leadership.
Trust built through responsiveness, judgement and the reassuring sense that somebody actually understands your problem rather than assuming it will always fit neatly into a template.
The firms that mistake automation alone for differentiation may discover they've simply made themselves identical to everyone else who had the same idea.
Prefer to listen? Catch the full conversation on Spotify or Apple Podcasts @Lawsy Originals
Perhaps Ian's most interesting observation isn't about AI at all.
It's about metrics.
Law firms obsess over origination, revenue and lateral hiring while devoting comparably fewer resources to the success of their existing people.
Ask a partner how much they've billed and they'll probably know to the penny.
Ask how many future partners, general counsel or business leaders they've helped create and in some cases the conversation becomes noticeably quieter.
That's an odd blind spot for an industry that insists people are its greatest asset.
Ian argues firms should become talent factories again.
Tomorrow's successful lawyer won't merely possess legal knowledge. They'll need commercial fluency, technological confidence and enough emotional intelligence to build relationships in an increasingly louder world.
The differentiator won't be who can produce an NDA.
It'll be who clients instinctively call before deciding whether they need one.
That philosophy also explains the partnership with Zero Gravity.
Virtual internships, simulated legal environments and scalable coaching aren't acts of corporate philanthropy wrapped in marketing language. They're attempts to widen the funnel without compromising standards.
There's a difference.
The legal industry likes to imagine disruption arriving in dramatic fashion.
But adoption is much more understated.
A flatter hierarchy. Better training. Faster feedback. A graduate trusted with work they supposedly aren't ready for until somebody discovers they were ready all along.
The firms that win won't necessarily be the ones with the most sophisticated software.
They'll be the ones that use it to close the gap between intelligence and experience.