Over my last three blogs, I’ve made three connected arguments. First, AI is breaking the centuries-old relationship between time and price. Second, clients are not really buying hours. Third, what they are increasingly buying is Jazz (this is a more funky and euphonic acronym for Judgement as a Service).
If my analysis is correct, a significant challenge remains: how do you deliver judgement consistently across an entire firm? Most law firms already contain brilliant pricing judgement. The problem is that it sits inside individual partners.
One partner knows how to frame options. Another knows how to scope effectively. A third is excellent at creating pricing certainty without exposing the firm to unnecessary risk. Years of experience. Thousands of conversations. Countless lessons learned. The challenge is not creating judgement. The challenge is scaling it and doing so consistently.
Historically, we’ve tried to do that through training, mentoring and better processes. Those things remain hugely important and I have spent much of my career helping firms improve exactly those capabilities. But in the delivery of that cultural change, I have observed that training alone is not enough.
The moment of truth occurs when a lawyer sits opposite a client and has to answer three deceptively simple questions: What will this cost? What are my options? How certain can you be?
Clients consistently tell us they want transparency, choice and certainty. Law firms consistently say they want improved pricing capability and consistency. The challenge has always been connecting those two ambitions.
For many years I viewed that as primarily a behavioural challenge but in changing behaviours, I saw that it is also an infrastructure challenge.
That insight from the coalface is what led to the development of IntelliPrice®. Not as a replacement for judgement. Not as a pricing robot. And certainly not as another AI tool looking for a problem to solve.
The ambition is much simpler than that: to harness the power of AI whilst keeping the lawyer in charge in order to apply pricing judgement more consistently, help firms capture and share pricing expertise, and help clients get the transparency, choice and certainty they have been seeking for years.
As I write this, IntelliPrice® remains a work in progress rather than a finished product. There is nothing to buy, no launch countdown and no dramatic reveal.
But after years of discussing pricing with law firms, one conclusion has become increasingly difficult to avoid.
If the future of legal services is about selling value, rather than time, firms will need better ways to capture, apply and scale judgement. I believe that future is much closer than most people realise, and the time to act is now.