The Future Is Bright Podcast

Private equity is beginning to reshape the economics of the legal industry, but are law firms prepared for the financial, operational, and cultural consequences of outside investment?

Elliott Portnoy, founding global CEO of Dentons, joins Chris Batz to share his perspective on the growing role of private equity in the legal profession. After overseeing 61 law firm combinations at Dentons, Elliott now advises private equity sponsors evaluating investments in law firms and legal services businesses. His experience on both sides of the equation offers a candid look at what makes a firm attractive to investors and why some firms aren't ready to make a deal.

One of the biggest challenges? Proposed partner compensation cuts of 50% to 75% over five years may create impressive valuations on paper, but how realistic are those numbers when a firm's most valuable lawyers can simply walk away? Elliott explains why sustainable compensation structures, thoughtful deal preparation, and the right private equity partner matter far more than chasing the highest purchase price.

The conversation also examines how AI, access to capital, and new business models are changing the competitive dynamics of the legal market. Which firms are best positioned to succeed, and which could find themselves squeezed between elite global players and smaller, tech-enabled competitors?

For law firm leaders considering outside investment, Elliott offers a practical perspective on the opportunities, risks, and strategic decisions that will shape the next decade of the legal profession.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 The Future of Law Firms and Private Equity

05:11 Is Your Law Firm Ready for Private Equity?

10:07 Choosing the Right Private Equity Partner

21:20 Partner Compensation, EBITDA, and Law Firm Valuations

31:46 Private Equity Advice for Law Firm Leaders

34:50 Building an AI-Driven Law Firm

37:28 The Future of Law Firms: Predictions for the Next Decade

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Web bio: https://www.dentons.com/en/elliott-portnoy

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Company web profile: https://www.baretzbrunelle.com/howard-rosenberg

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Can independent law firms stay competitive as AI, private capital, and consolidation reshape the legal industry?

Terri Pepper has spent more than a decade as CEO of TerraLex, a global network of independent law firms across more than 140 countries. As she prepares to step away from the role, she joins Chris and Howard to discuss how independent firms can offer global reach without giving up what makes them distinct.

Terri shares how TerraLex uses collaboration to help firms compete for cross-border work, share resources, and learn from peers. She also challenges a common misconception: independent does not mean small or less sophisticated.

The conversation turns to AI and what TerraLex learned from building MyLexi, its closed AI assistant. Terri explains why TerraLex focused on a specific use case for AI and kept MyLexi simple.

With private capital adding another layer of pressure, independence may soon require firms to make some hard strategic choices. She also explains why collaboration between independent firms could become more important as the industry changes.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Terri Pepper's Leadership at TerraLex

03:23 How Independent Law Firms Compete Globally

08:50 Why Legal Networks Work for Global Clients

17:43 How TerraLex Uses AI With MyLexi

25:23 How AI Is Changing the Legal Industry

29:59 Private Capital and the Future of Independent Law Firms

31:49 The Future of AI, Law Firms, and Legal Work

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It took Goldman Sachs 30 years and a billion-dollar partner exodus to finally vote for permanent capital, and Chris Batz suspects today's law firm partnerships are running the same clock.

On the Future is Bright, Chris draws from Chapter 15 of Lloyd Blankfein's Streetwise to examine the parallels between Goldman Sachs and today's law firms. When rivals could advise and finance clients under one roof, Goldman could only advise. Chris calls this asymmetry: a door that opens from one side only.

What does a 1990s investment bank have to do with your law firm? Law firms distribute their profits every year, so when partners leave, capital and revenue go with them. New competitors backed by private capital can offer equity to top talent, and a partnership can only answer with cash. AI is also raising a compensation question the billable hour can't answer.

Why do partners keep delaying decisions they know are coming? At Goldman's 1998 meeting, partners spoke against the IPO for six hours, then voted three to one in favor by secret ballot. Open debate showed what felt safe to say. The private vote showed what people wanted.

Chris closes with a principle borrowed from Henry Paulson: structure follows strategy. Is your firm's structure supporting its strategy, or quietly canceling it?

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Lessons From Goldman Sachs' IPO for Law Firm Leaders

05:47 The Impact of Market Changes on Goldman Sachs

09:11 Permanent Capital and Equity: How Law Firms Mirror 1990s Goldman

12:07 The Future of Law Firms in a Changing Landscape

14:57 Where the Goldman Sachs Comparison Breaks Down

20:51 Capital vs. Culture and Generational Fairness in Law Firm Private Equity

Connect with Chris Batz:

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Mark Wasserman spent thirty five years building one law firm before staking his reputation on a bet almost nobody in the room believed in.

Host Chris Batz and co-host Howard Rosenberg of The Future is Bright sit down with Mark Wasserman, CEO Emeritus of Eversheds Sutherland, to unpack the law firm merger strategy behind one of the industry's most unlikely transatlantic combinations. Wasserman walks through why he initially dismissed the idea, what changed his mind, and why keeping separate profit and loss statements let the deal survive Brexit and a U.S. election in the same year.

The conversation moves quickly into what is reshaping the profession today. Wasserman explains why private equity in law firms keeps running into the same wall. Law firm non-competes let partners walk out the door with clients attached, and that reality changes what outside capital is actually willing to fund. He is candid about AI adoption in law firms too. Real trust between clients and firms has not caught up to the technology yet, he says.

Wasserman also opens up about Connexo, the alternative legal service providers model he helped build years before AI became a boardroom topic, and shares blunt advice on managing partner succession for leaders weighing their own law firm merger strategy. It's a conversation built on decades of pattern recognition rather than predictions.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Meet Mark Wasserman, CEO Emeritus of Eversheds Sutherland

01:54 Inside the Transatlantic Merger With Eversheds

08:33 Private Equity in Law Firms and the Non-Compete Problem

12:18 AI Adoption in Law Firms and the Trust Gap

20:13 Building Connexo as an Alternative Legal Service Provider

29:57 The Demand Signal That Shows the Old Model Is Breaking

Connect with Mark Wasserman:

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Reena SenGupta invented the ranking system law firms love to hate, and now she explains why AI will make the legal profession more human.

Reena spent thirty years measuring the legal industry from the inside, first building the Chambers and Partners rankings, then running the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers program for two decades. On this episode she walks Howard and I through what her latest research with Harvey shows about AI adoption in law, and the numbers complicate the doom narrative. Headcount is flat. Output is climbing. Clients and firms think they are having honest conversations about pricing, but the data says otherwise. So where is the real gap?

Reena introduces the idea of the frozen middle, the layer of lawyers who use AI daily without ever becoming competent in it, and explains why that distinction will define who thrives over the next decade. She also makes the case that empathy belongs in the same category as legal drafting or negotiation, a skill to be trained rather than a trait some lawyers simply have. What does a law firm look like when the hourly rate no longer sits at the center of the business? Reena has a theory, and it starts underground, with fungi.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Meet Reena SenGupta, Architect of the Chambers Rankings

03:59 Why Reena Launched RSGI and the FT Innovative Lawyers Program

09:42 How Legal Innovation Has Changed Since 2005

23:48 AI, Jevons Paradox and the Future of Legal Demand

29:22 The Fungal Network Metaphor for Legal AI

36:32 Understanding the Frozen Middle in AI Adoption

40:03 Predictions for the Legal Industry a Decade From Now

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Two Law.com veterans who spend their careers interrogating law firm secrets turn the lens on their own industry's next twenty years, from partner comp black boxes to the real odds of a publicly traded law firm by 2040.

On this episode of the Future is Bright, Howard Rosenberg and I sat down with Gina Passarella, Group Chief Content Officer of Law.com, and David Gialanella, Editor-in-Chief of Law.com. Both have covered Big Law mergers for years and are now navigating one of their own, as ALM and Law Business Research combine into Centellic. That firsthand experience shapes how they talk about what firms hide, including from themselves.

One tension comes up again and again. Firms love to talk about their AI strategy in public, but how many of them actually have one? Gina and David suggest the gap between AI messaging and AI reality is wider than most firms would admit. Partner compensation gets the same treatment. Averages sound clean in a press release. They rarely tell you what's happening inside a firm.

The discussion turns to a scenario-planning project mapping the legal profession out to 2040, built around three forces: how much power shifts from lawyers to algorithms, whether the industry's tech stack consolidates or fragments, and who ends up setting the rules. Will regulators hold the line on the partnership model, or will client demand and private capital force it open? Gina and David don't pretend to know for certain, and that honesty is part of what makes their read on the industry worth hearing.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 ALM's Merger with Law Business Research

01:32 Inside a Major Legal Media Merger

09:12 Business Model Shifts in Law Firm Strategy

12:55 What Law Firms Hide From Themselves

20:14 Partner Talent Mobility and Law Firm Business Models

24:17 Mapping the Legal Profession to 2040

29:20 Could Law Firms Go Public by 2040

32:29 How AI Is Reshaping Demand for Legal Services

39:16 The Data Law Firms Don't Want to Share

Connect with Gina Passarella:

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What does it take to run a 200-million pound law firm without ever taking outside investment or merging with a bigger name?

Roger Bull, managing partner of Burges Salmon, joins Chris Batz and Howard Rosenberg to unpack the five-year strategy his firm just launched, one built on 25 listening sessions with roughly 1,500 people before the partnership board finalized a single objective. In a market where large international firms are distracted by questions of US mergers and office footprint alignment, Bull argues that a UK-focused independent firm operating through a flexible network of preferred international relationships can out-position competitors chasing scale for its own sake. What does strategic clarity buy you that a bigger balance sheet can't?

The discussion gets into the governance mechanics behind that clarity: KPIs set across revenue, headcount, and technology deployment, a mid-point strategic review built in by design, and a board that revisits assumptions every six months rather than waiting for the next five-year cycle. Bull traces his own trajectory from the employment team to the managing partner role and revisits a client meeting early in his career that reframed how he thinks about advisory relationships. In it, the lead partner spent the opening stretch on the client's market position before any project came up. He's equally direct about AI, framing it less as a productivity tool and more as a forcing function that pushes firms away from time-and-materials billing toward a harder question. Where does the advice actually create value, and how do you prove it?

The most revealing data point from his listening tour wasn't tension between legal and business services teams. It was what happened when leadership removed the ceiling on ambition entirely. The bottleneck shifted from generating ideas to prioritizing which ones the firm could actually execute well.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Introducing Roger Bull, Managing Partner Of Burges Salmon

01:17 Listening Sessions With 1,500 People Across The Firm

07:58 Staying An Independent UK Law Firm Instead Of Merging

14:18 Leading A Law Firm Through Brexit, Covid, And Global Shocks

25:57 Measuring Law Firm Growth With Strategic Kpis

28:18 How Ai And Technology Are Reshaping Legal Services

31:15 The Biggest Surprise From The Firm's Strategic Listening Tour

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Gary Wingens led Lowenstein Sandler through Lehman Brothers' collapse and a global pandemic, and now he says AI won't shrink legal work at all, it will multiply it.

Wingens spent thirty-nine years at Lowenstein Sandler, eighteen as managing partner, before stepping into the role of chair, and he built that transition on a principle most leaders resist: he refused to pick his own successor. That same instinct for stepping back at the right moment runs through his conversation with Chris Batz and Howard Rosenberg.

At the center of it is a theory pulled from 1800s economics. Jevons Paradox holds that when the cost of a good drops, demand rises rather than falls, and Wingens argues the same logic applies to legal work in the age of AI. He backs it with a real number: a document review project a client refused at eight million dollars became a profitable million-dollar engagement once AI cut the cost of delivery. If that pattern holds industry-wide, what happens to a business model still anchored to the billable hour?

He also draws a direct line between 2008 and COVID, two crises that felt eerily similar from inside the firm but produced opposite outcomes, one nearly breaking the business and the other proving that panic drives clients toward more legal help, not less. Underneath it all is a firm built on a specific kind of stubbornness, traced back to a founder who once walked away from a client rather than abandon his pro bono work, a conviction that still shapes how Wingens thinks about leadership and loyalty today.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Gary Wingens on Leading a Law Firm Through Crisis and Succession

10:08 Why AI Will Create More Legal Work, Not Less

28:17 Building a Pro Bono Practice Rooted in Firm Culture

39:12 Leadership Advice for the Next Generation of Law Firm Leaders

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The dam is breaking: law firm capital deals are closing faster than regulators can write the rules to stop them.

Trish Rich of Holland & Knight and Lucian Pera of Adams & Reese are two ethics lawyers operating at the center of one of the profession's most consequential shifts, and their deal volume tells the story better than any headline. Trish's team closed six deals in all of 2025. By early June 2026, they had already closed fifteen. The players at the table have changed too. A year ago, this was almost entirely a personal injury story. Today, immigration firms, corporate law firms, and insurance companies are all asking serious questions about what MSO structures could mean for their businesses.

So what about the regulatory pushback? Trish described it as trying to stop a waterfall by standing underneath it. Lucian was more blunt: the loudest opposition is coming from one segment of plaintiff's trial lawyers trying to protect their franchise from another. The same people backing restrictive legislation are often calling Trish and Lucian to get their clients in under the wire before it passes.

The big law question is no longer theoretical. Lucian predicted that more than one major firm announcement is likely before the end of 2026, with structures leaning toward minority investment given the challenge of building consensus across hundreds of partners. When the capital comes in, the primary plan is talent, not technology. On AI specifically, Lucian was direct: if costs commoditize the way technology historically does, a small firm with the right tools could quietly out-earn a firm that spent hundreds of millions chasing the same outcome. The firms closing deals that actually work share one thing in common. They came to the table with trust, a shared business vision, and a plan for what comes next.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Law Firm Capital and MSO Deals: What's Actually Happening Right Now

03:04 Regulatory Pushback and Why Capital Keeps Winning

12:06 Insurance, Risk Management, and New Deal Structures

18:12 Best Practices for Successful MSO Deals

23:47 AI, Native Law Firms, and the Future of Legal

Links

Connect with Trish Rich:

Law Firm Web bio: https://www.hklaw.com/en/professionals/r/rich-trisha-m

Trish's LinkedIn Profile link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trisharich

Connect with Lucian Pera:

Law Firm Web bio: https://www.adamsandreese.com/people/lucian-pera

Lucian's LinkedIn Profile link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucianpera

Connect with Howard Rosenberg:

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hrosenberg/

Company web profile: https://www.baretzbrunelle.com/howard-rosenberg

Connect with Chris Batz:

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Andy Kvesic left the job every lawyer wants to build something the profession had never seen.

As CEO of Aprio Legal, he traded a general counsel role at a thriving family office for the harder, riskier work of acquiring a Phoenix law firm and redesigning how professional services actually work. The result is a historic combination: the first time two Alternative Business Structure firms have merged, bringing together a corporate law firm and a national accounting and advisory firm backed by private equity. Attorneys, accountants, wealth planners, and business advisors now serve the same clients under one roof.

The idea came from watching entrepreneurs waste time and energy bouncing between disconnected professionals who never coordinated with each other. Arizona's 2021 rule change allowing non-lawyer law firm ownership gave Kvesic the opening to try something different. His merger with Aprio wasn't a calculated exit. It was the recognition that both firms were solving the same problem from opposite ends: Aprio's professionals were constantly referring clients out for legal work, and Kvesic's attorneys were constantly referring clients out for tax and accounting. Neither could fully serve their clients alone.

Building the integrated platform also forced a reckoning with how differently law firms and accounting firms run their businesses. After two decades working almost exclusively with other lawyers, Kvesic found Aprio's infrastructure to be a genuine upgrade: multi-year planning, pipeline visibility, real margin analysis. For an industry that largely runs on a cash-in, cash-out model aimed at maximizing year-end partner distributions, the difference is significant.

The legal profession is changing whether it wants to or not. The more interesting question Kvesic raises is whether the people inside it will have the courage to lead that change rather than resist it.

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 From General Counsel to Law Firm Owner: Andy Kvesic's Career Path

02:51 The Vision Behind Raddock's Law and the ABS Model

09:03 How Aprio Legal Became the First ABS-to-ABS Merger

14:57 Cultural Differences Between Lawyers and Accountants

24:33 How Accounting Firm Discipline Is Changing Law Firm Operations

29:35 Growth Strategy and the Integrated Legal Accounting Platform

37:52 ABS Advice and the Future of the Legal Profession

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Andy Kvesic - CEO, Aprio Legal | Partner

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