What happens when you separate elite legal talent from the traditional law firm structure? This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Manuel Deó, co-founder and co-CEO of Ambar Partners, about a model designed around senior independent lawyers, flexible capacity, enterprise technology, and client choice. Deó explains why he and co-founder Rosa Espín did not set out to replace Big Law, but instead to address a gap between permanent in-house hiring and traditional outside counsel.
At the center of Ambar’s model is a simple idea: legal demand comes in different shapes, and the delivery model should match the problem. Deó describes how Ambar gives lawyers control over the clients, projects, fees, and schedules they take on, while giving clients greater visibility into cost and the individual lawyers doing the work. He also discusses Ambar’s recent Chambers recognition and argues that the term “alternative” is starting to lose some of its usefulness as clients grow more comfortable assembling legal services from a wider range of providers.
Deó walks through what Ambar calls its legal operating system, built around belonging, business, backbone, and badge. The model combines a professional community with business development, compliance, contracting, billing, technology, and institutional credibility for independent lawyers and specialist boutiques. Ambar’s public materials describe a shared technology environment that includes tools such as Harvey, Microsoft Copilot, Legora, and other legal technology products. The goal, according to Deó, is to give independent lawyers access to the infrastructure associated with a large firm without requiring them to give up professional independence.
The conversation also turns to AI, knowledge, and professional judgment. Deó argues that legal knowledge is becoming more abundant while judgment grows more valuable. He describes Ambar’s work on “expert twins,” where approved knowledge, prior work, playbooks, and experience associated with an individual lawyer form a trusted layer for AI-assisted work. That emphasis on institutional knowledge and permissions echoes a broader trend across legal AI, where vendors are increasingly focused on connecting AI systems to trusted internal work product and organizational context.
Finally, Deó offers a broader view of where legal delivery is heading. He sees legal departments assembling teams dynamically from in-house lawyers, traditional firms, independent specialists, boutiques, managed services, and AI agents based on the needs of a particular matter. Instead of asking which firm to hire, clients increasingly have reason to ask what combination of people, technology, expertise, and risk structure best fits the work. For Deó, the future belongs less to a single dominant delivery model and more to legal departments acting as orchestrators of capability.
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[Special Thanks to Legal Technology Hub for their sponsoring this episode.]
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca
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Transcript
Greg Lambert (00:01)
Hey everyone, I’m Greg Lambert, and this week on The Geek in Review, we have with us Manuel Deó from Ambar Partners. But first, let’s get some insights from our friends at Legal Technology Hub.
Marlene Gebauer (00:14)
Hi, I’m Marlene Gebauer from The Geek in Review. I have Sam Moore here from Legal Technology Hub. He’s going to tell us about AI governance from the advisory side.
Sam Moore (00:23)
Thank you. Good to see you again. Well, in the advisory team at Legal Technology Hub, we’ve been having a lot of conversations with clients about AI governance. Now, most law firms and departments have at least an AI policy of some kind, and there are some broad standards which are starting to emerge. A trend we’re seeing at the moment is a shift away from policies written in 2023 and 2024, which largely stated what you couldn’t do, and towards a more informative approach which defines different risk categories and makes distinctions between routine, low-risk use of AI and other more substantial use cases. I think that’s appropriate for where we are. It’s also what clients are coming to expect from their advisors. But one of the bigger challenges we’re seeing right now is, how do you express an AI use policy in such a way that any member of your legal team could explain it to a client? I think that’s still a big challenge for the industry.
Marlene Gebauer (00:41)
Okay.
Sam Moore (01:21)
I don’t think clients are all that happy if their attorney says, “I’ll have to get back to you about that,” because the attorney is using AI day-to-day. So they should be able to explain the policy themselves. How else do you know they’re complying with it? We’re doing some interesting work at the moment helping law firms and law departments take those first-version AI use policies that are very much “thou shalt not” and turn them into more easily readable, appropriate governance positions that inform the conversation with clients. If anyone wants to find out more about our advisory services, they can find me or Cheryl Wilson Griffin on LinkedIn, or they can visit legaltechnologyhub.com.
Marlene Gebauer (02:05)
Thank you, Sam. I mean, it is important to have AI policy in plain language so people understand it.
Sam Moore (02:11)
Absolutely.
Marlene Gebauer (02:19)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.
Greg Lambert (02:26)
And I’m Greg Lambert, and today we are examining the complete deconstruction of the traditional law firm. For decades, the legal industry was defined by centralization, kind of bringing the talent, the technology, the overhead, and the clients under one structured, highly leveraged roof and partnership pyramid. But a new model is proving you can unbundle law firms, keeping the elite talent and the enterprise technology while stripping away the rigid hierarchy.
Marlene Gebauer (02:56)
Our guest today is operating at the absolute forefront of this shift in the European and Latin American markets. Manuel Deó is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ambar Partners, which recently secured a Band One ranking in Chambers as a leading alternative legal service provider. Before launching Ambar, Manuel was the youngest Spanish lawyer to make partner at Latham & Watkins, eventually leading their corporate and M&A practice in Spain.
Greg Lambert (03:25)
And Manuel and his co-founder, Rosa Espín, have built what they describe as a legal operating system. It’s a digital platform called Ambar Haus that connects a highly vetted, curated community of over 400 senior independent lawyers with multinational enterprise clients. They are deploying enterprise tools like Harvey AI at scale, across borders, and completely rethinking how legal capacity is consumed and built.
Marlene Gebauer (03:55)
Manuel, welcome to The Geek in Review.
Manuel Deó (03:57)
Thank you, Marlene. Thank you, Greg, for having me. It’s a true pleasure. Thank you.
Marlene Gebauer (04:03)
So Manuel, you went from leading corporate and private equity at Latham & Watkins in Spain to co-founding Ambar. What did you see in the traditional legal market that convinced you to build a different kind of legal business?
Manuel Deó (04:18)
First, I should say that I loved Big Law, right? I always consider myself a son of the old model, and I’m a grateful son for many different reasons. Latham, in particular, where I was a partner, taught me what excellence, intensity, and global execution look like.
I did not build Ambar because I believed traditional law firms were broken. This is something people sometimes ask me. I built it with Rosa because no single institution is optimized for every type of legal need. We kept seeing two false choices when we were back at Big Law.
On one side, you had outstanding lawyers who had to choose between institutional prestige and professional autonomy. On the other side, you had clients who had to choose between adding permanent headcount to their teams or engaging a traditional law firm, usually through a narrow model, an hourly-rate basis.
But a significant part of corporate legal demand is neither permanent nor junior. It is senior, important, urgent, and variable. The market has never been short of talent. I think quite the opposite. What it’s been short of is an architecture capable of deploying that talent differently.
We wanted to separate expertise from real estate in specific offices on specific streets, seniority from hierarchy, and value from time. I think the traditional legal market had two gears. One is hire a lawyer, or hire a law firm. What we built is a gearbox. I think that’s the broader opportunity we’re building here. Not to replace law firms or internal legal departments, but to give clients a more intelligent, flexible way of building legal capacity around the problem they have.
So that’s what we’re doing and why we went from Big Law to building Ambar.
Greg Lambert (06:38)
As you were building this with Rosa, how were you thinking of structuring it in a way that was both enticing for the lawyers you wanted to recruit and also for the clients to understand what the business model was and what you were offering?
Manuel Deó (07:02)
Right. I think for lawyers the most important part of our model is freedom. We give lawyers freedom. Freedom to decide which projects they are engaged on, for which clients, for what fees, on what terms, and at what moment of the year they want to work. They have full control to decide which type of projects they are a part of. That’s the main value proposition for lawyers.
On the other side, for clients, it’s twofold. One is having full control. Full control over the cost, and also over the specific lawyer delivering the legal service. When you’re part of other, more traditional models, you hire a firm, but you don’t always have full control over who’s doing the job, right? Who’s doing the legal work? Because they have a number of people there doing the legal delivery.
So from one specific point, that’s full control over cost and delivery. And second, access to highly vetted lawyers where you have full control over the talent, expertise, and knowledge of the lawyer, who is highly vetted by third parties, not only by us, but by other clients, other colleagues, and, obviously, traditional firms.
Marlene Gebauer (08:17)
See, this is interesting. When we talk about value, we’re usually talking about value to the client, but I think you’re talking about it going both ways. What does the lawyer find valuable to work on, as well as delivering value to the client?
Manuel Deó (08:29)
Yeah, absolutely.
Greg Lambert (08:32)
Marlene mentioned this in the intro, but congratulations on Ambar’s recent Chambers recognition as Band One for ALSPs in Europe. Both you and Rosa were also named individually in Band One as well. The Chambers submissions, I know outside of legal no one knows what those are, but it’s a big deal inside legal. So what does that recognition tell you about the legal market’s acceptance of the type of model you’re providing?
Manuel Deó (09:07)
Right. The recognition is specifically for what they call NewLaw, or alternative legal service firms. What that tells me is that the word “alternative,” which is a buzzword used in the sector for many years, is approaching its expiration date.
We’re grateful for a prestigious institution like Chambers recognizing Ambar as Band One with other global companies, but clients validated the model before Chambers did. Chambers has made visible something that was already happening.
I think the true thing is that sophisticated clients are increasingly indifferent to labels and brands. They care about quality, speed, accountability, commercial understanding, and value. The general counsel, which is the name given to the most senior person in the legal department at big corporations and S&P 500 companies, are sophisticated people with a lot of pressure in their companies. They’re typically trusted advisors to the CEO and have a lot of pressure to deliver more value with less.
This recognition demonstrates that top-tier standards exist outside the traditional partnership pyramid. Independence, which is part of our value for lawyers because they are independent lawyers, does not have to mean fragmentation. Flexibility, which is something we provide to our clients, does not have to mean lower quality. Quite the opposite.
A lawyer does not have to sit inside a large institution for that lawyer’s expertise to be institutional-grade, relevant, and appealing to a big client. We are proud of that recognition. But the ranking is a mirror, it’s not a moat. The question is no longer whether clients will accept these models. I think they already do.
The hard question for me is who will scale the model without diluting trust, quality, or accountability.
Marlene Gebauer (11:33)
So I want to dig in a little bit at how the platform works.
Manuel Deó (11:38)
Sure.
Marlene Gebauer (11:39)
Ambar describes itself as a global platform of independent senior legal talent and as an operating system for flexible, borderless legal work. So walk us through what that operating system provides to lawyers and clients.
Manuel Deó (11:55)
Sure. I sometimes regret using the word “platform,” although people sometimes refer to us like that, because people picture a database of lawyers with better typography, basically. We’re not putting lawyers on a website and calling it innovation, right? It’s a totally different thing.
Traditionally, a law firm bundled several things together. The talent, the brand, the clients, the technology, compliance, operations, and professional community. When a great lawyer became independent, that lawyer did not lose their expertise, but they often lost access to that entire institutional bundle.
What Ambar is doing is rebuilding those capabilities as a shared infrastructure without asking the lawyer or boutique law firm to give up their independence, their economics, brand, or professional identity.
For independent lawyers and specialist boutiques, which are the types of lawyers who are part of Ambar, we think about an operating system through four Bs.
One is belonging. You are an independent lawyer, but you’re also part of something bigger. Independence is professionally liberating when people leave certain institutions, but it also becomes lonely. We provide a curated professional community, practice groups, city chapters, trusted peers, knowledge-sharing spaces, and opportunities to collaborate with other exceptional lawyers. That’s the first one, belonging.
The second one is business. We provide access to sophisticated referrals among the different lawyers, cross-selling opportunities, team formation, and the infrastructure required to transform expertise into a sustainable legal business. Many outstanding lawyers do not want to spend half their lives becoming salespeople. That’s typically something lawyers don’t like to do, or chasing invoices, or learning digital marketing, or whatever. They want to practice law at the highest level. We help create those conditions around them to make that possible. So that’s the second B, business.
The third one is backbone. That’s the operational machinery around legal work. The intake, the proposals for the client, building the proposal with your scope, your fees, the contractual engagement letter, the specific conflict processes, KYC, anti-money laundering, insurance, invoicing, collections, all the red tape around sophisticated legal service delivery. We take care of that. The lawyer remains independent but no longer has to rebuild an entire institution alone with all the compliance and KYC around that. So that’s the third part, backbone.
The fourth one is the badge. That’s certification of your expertise, reputation, positioning, and institutional credibility, which is important in our sector and, obviously, in any professional service. We give independent experts and boutiques the ability to compete for sophisticated legal work that was historically reserved for larger organizations while preserving their own identity.
We are also building that with AI. AI is becoming more important in any profession, but obviously in legal. There are many players, frontier models building legal verticals, and AI legal-specific companies building legal tools. We have agreements with certain legal AI tools to deliver that legal AI expertise and those tools for our lawyers.
Greg Lambert (16:08)
Let me point at that last, almost like a fifth level here on the tech stack. How do you set up the attorneys on the technology stack so they have access to the tools, but then they also understand, say, how to use the tools, the interoperability between them, and all of that? How do you look at your tech stack?
Marlene Gebauer (16:28)
Responsibly.
Manuel Deó (16:34)
Right. I think we’re moving into a moment in which knowledge will be a commodity. That’s something hard for a lawyer because we’ve been, and I still consider myself a lawyer, tested for our knowledge of specific verticals, specific cases, specific contracts. But that’s a commodity.
I think the key here is that lawyers need to move from that sort of mantra where knowledge was key to a mantra where judgment will be the key driver of sophisticated legal services moving forward.
That’s our focus. Giving lawyers the ability to control, train, and use these tools, have full knowledge of the different AI tools available, and know that certain tools are available and helpful for specific needs while others are better for other needs. And second, providing judgment to that sort of legal service delivery.
The technology we’re building with other partners is allowing that judgment to develop memory, speed, and consistency, which are likely the three things clients are asking for.
Memory in terms of, “I want all my proprietary data, all my proprietary information to be stored. I want the AI to learn from my prior experience and from my knowledge.” Speed in terms of efficiency and time of delivery. And consistency. “I want to control that all my answers, all my legal advice, are consistent with my prior advice.”
That’s what we’re building. We’re building it with training, obviously, with different dedicated people in the different AI companies we’re partnering with. It’s not a one-shot process. It’s long.
We have more than 300 lawyers in our community currently from different backgrounds, different seniorities, and different geographies. I think sophisticated lawyers are typically tech savvy, but obviously not all of them have the same appetite to learn and the same ability to be aware of what AI is and what AI delivers to them.
Marlene Gebauer (18:59)
It’s interesting. You distinguish between knowledge as a commodity versus judgment, where I think a lot of firms would say their internal knowledge of things is kind of their IP. So how do you distinguish the two?
Manuel Deó (19:17)
There’s been a great debate around that topic lately in Big Law, basically because many firms have realized that if you hire an AI frontier model or AI legal solution, and you upload certain documentation to that AI tool, you might lose control over that information and not even know where that knowledge will end up.
So we’re building what we call the expert twins, which is a specific layer of information and documentation for each and every lawyer who is part of our community.
That’s basically a controlled, evolving system built so that the specific expert has approved knowledge. Knowledge that they approve, which is valid, which is dedicated. Picture a contract, picture a court case, something they’ve been validly involved in and they know that knowledge is valid. It’s been certified by them, with playbooks and experience specifically uploaded by that lawyer, and building a second layer of information validated by that lawyer.
That helps the lawyer trust the information being used by the AI tool.
Greg Lambert (20:46)
I want to switch over and look at Ambar from your clients’ perspective. I know a lot of them are looking at adding internal headcount or engaging with a traditional law firm for their legal needs. So how do you approach your clients and kind of sell to them what your platform at Ambar provides instead of these traditional methods?
Manuel Deó (21:15)
Sure. We use a simple rule. Fixed demand deserves fixed cost. Variable demand deserves variable capacity. Rare expertise deserves access and not ownership.
What I mean by that is that a company should hire internally, as an FTE, as a full-time employee, when the work is permanent, predictable, and central to its institutional knowledge, even typically sensitive core strategic information or knowledge in that organization.
But it should engage a traditional law firm when it needs institutional firepower, a highly leveraged team, court representation, a regulated local structure, or the resources required for a bet-the-company matter. M&A, capital markets, all those major, important transactions in the life of a company.
But Ambar sits between those two options when the need is important but variable, when they require senior expertise quickly, or when they need someone operating close to the business without making a permanent addition to the organization.
So you might have a fractional lawyer working 10, 20, 30 hours a week. It might be a leave of absence of one of your colleagues, post-acquisition integration, an internal expansion, a specialist regulatory problem, an investigation, litigation support for a specific period of time, or additional capacity during a peak of work.
In 2025, we handled approximately 300 projects, 293 projects, for 140 clients. More than 70% of that work was fractional counsel work, which is an external lawyer dedicated to your team as a natural extension of your in-house team.
This is important because fractional work is not simply a short secondment. The lawyer in a fractional project becomes part of the client’s operating rhythm, but the capacity remains adjustable. The client gains seniority, continuity, and business context without automatically adding permanent fixed cost.
Sometimes the problem is urgent, but that doesn’t mean the organization chart should become permanent. Clients do not always need another lawyer. They need the right expertise at the precise moment when that expertise becomes valuable.
More especially now, we’re in an uncertain moment where people don’t know, from a macroeconomic perspective, what’s going to happen. In many verticals and industries, there’s a lot of uncertainty. Of course, AI is bringing even more uncertainty in the legal sector.
Many clients, many general counsel, look at the fractional model as a quick, efficient, and flexible manner of accessing capacity without adding permanent headcount.
Marlene Gebauer (24:46)
So operating across jurisdictions with hundreds of independent lawyers, I picture, creates difficult questions around conflicts, privilege, professional ethics, data security, and AI use.
Greg Lambert (24:55)
A little bit.
Marlene Gebauer (24:59)
So how are all those responsibilities allocated and managed, and who’s ultimately accountable to the client?
Manuel Deó (25:11)
Sure. Independence must never mean ambiguity. In fact, a distributed model like ours only works when responsibility is more explicit, not less.
The allocation is clear. The lawyer remains professionally responsible for legal judgment, conflict checks, privilege, and all the ethical obligations applicable in the relevant jurisdiction in which they are barred or qualified.
Ambar is accountable for the operating environment we control. The certification of that lawyer, the selection, the contracting, the insurance we provide to our clients, the cybersecurity standards, governance, process, compliance, anti-money laundering, monitoring, and escalation.
In particular, one of the things you’ve mentioned is conflicts, conflict checks, which are a critical part of our business. Those are assessed in relation to the individual lawyer and the particular engagement.
We do not create one central environment in which independent lawyers access confidential information belonging to the clients of other lawyers in the community. We would never do that.
Each professional, each lawyer, retains responsibility for their own practice and professional obligations, supported by our engagement processes and infrastructure.
Privilege is addressed through the structure of the engagement and the rules of the relevant jurisdiction applicable to that engagement. It’s never something we simply assume because technology is involved.
AI use is also governed by clear principles of client requirements, approved tools, defined data boundaries, confidentiality, and human review. As you might expect, we have B2B enterprise clients who are sophisticated. They all have AI governance and data privacy policies which we need to comply with and be audited against.
Where local rules require work to be delivered through a regulated law firm or a particular professional structure, the engagement must reflect that.
So that’s what we do. We’re careful to do that and do not use the independence of those lawyers as a liability escape hatch.
We think distributed delivery should distribute capability, not responsibility. The client should never have to guess who owns the risk. We’re clear. The engagement letter covers that.
We have an engagement letter where the client, the lawyer, and Ambar are parties to the same relationship because we believe in transparency and each party knowing who owns what and who’s responsible for each part of the legal delivery.
Greg Lambert (28:21)
Well, I think this ties in nicely with the next question. I want to talk to you about Ambar’s community, its culture, and some of the interesting things I’ve seen.
As I was driving into work this morning, I was listening to something and someone mentioned culture at an organization. They defined it in a way that makes sense, but I hadn’t heard it quite this way before. Culture is a set of rules and guidelines on how a person should perform and act in the environment in order to succeed within this community.
When you have a distributed network of independent lawyers, let me ask you up front, how do you prevent this independent contractor from feeling like a transactional database of freelance attorneys? Let me start with that.
Manuel Deó (29:30)
Sure. It’s a long process. One is the right selection of the lawyers, so the vetting of that lawyer, being super demanding on the type of lawyer who is part of the community. We’re picky on that.
I hate to say that, but 95% of the lawyers who request being admitted to Ambar are not able to do it. So we have less than a 4% admission rate right now.
We require those lawyers to come from, or to have expertise in, a closed-ended list of law firms or in-house departments, which gives us certainty on the type of lawyer, the type of culture, and the work ethic around that lawyer.
We take that certification and admission process seriously. We’re part of it through the vetting of that lawyer with third-party references, but also with an in-person meeting with my co-founder, Rosa, who sits with each and every lawyer who’s part of Ambar and wants to be part of it. So we’re careful with that.
That’s one thing. Second, we have a clear code of practice. Obviously, when you’re talking about sophisticated lawyers, these lawyers come from specific backgrounds. They are subject to the ethical standards of their jurisdictions. This is a small market, and there’s tremendous ownership of each person’s reputation and brand.
We’ve never had any issue with that. We’re careful with it. We always have to be listening to our clients regarding the feedback we get on our lawyers in connection with our projects.
We’ve been disruptive there, too, because we’ve been proactively asking for feedback, which is something that’s not common in this sector, and getting the client to verbalize the feedback they have on their lawyers, put that on the record, and make that transparent to the lawyer.
So we’re careful about that. Obviously, it’s a distributed model. Ambar is accountable for the system and the lawyer is accountable for the legal judgment and the legal delivery. That’s clear. I think that’s something that’s also been clear for our clients.
Greg Lambert (32:24)
There’s one more thing you do in community that’s interesting to me, and that’s your communications with your clients.
You’ve put out a newsletter that I think you call Dr. No, and it’s read by thousands of general counsel. But instead of talking about case law updates and changes in regulation, you write about leadership, legal operations, and strategy.
How do your clients respond to a different approach like this?
Manuel Deó (33:10)
Sure. Dr. No, and by the way, the name comes from how certain in-house lawyers are described in their companies because they’re always saying no.
What we try to say there is that we need to put our clients at the center of the conversation, which is something that’s not common in the legal sector.
We’ve always been talking about the rainmakers in this law firm. We talked about Chambers before. Chambers has a lot of rankings, but they’ve always concentrated on law firms and not on in-house lawyers and general counsel.
What we’re trying to suggest here is that we should change the conversation, put the general counsel in the middle of the conversation, and offer different tools those lawyers in those companies need.
I’m not going to teach law to a general counsel or a senior lawyer in an important company. I would never intend to do that. But we talk about things they need to become more influential in their companies, to become more central.
Think about HR managers 20 years ago, who became influential people in their companies through many different changes. One of them is a change of name, which changed to Chief People Officer or Chief Talent Officer, and they became senior and influential people on the board.
Or CFOs, who went from being financial analysts or controllers to becoming influential people in their companies.
What we’re trying to provide are those tools for general counsel to become as influential as a Chief Legal Officer, someone who’s talking about metrics, return on investment, how much savings the department provides to the company, and treating a legal department as another separate business unit of a company.
Greg Lambert (35:25)
All right, well, we are at the end. We want to have you look back before we ask you our crystal ball question. So Manuel, what is something that’s different today, or wasn’t necessarily true a year ago?
Manuel Deó (35:48)
I don’t want to talk about AI because it would be too obvious. Obviously, every week we have a new development in AI.
Marlene Gebauer (35:59)
So boring, AI.
Manuel Deó (36:01)
Right. So it’s something I would avoid mentioning. It’s a difficult question, but I think we’ve run through a process where general counsel don’t want to be seen as a cost center in their companies and want to be seen as something different.
That’s changing the conversation, and it’s changing the type of solutions we as legal suppliers need to provide our clients.
Because it’s not a matter of an hourly rate or, “I’m the best expert in this specific industry.” It’s a matter of how much value did I provide to my client? Because I need to help that client explain to their CEO, their CFO, the value they’re bringing.
That’s something we’re starting to see now that we didn’t see a year, a year and a half ago. How important value contribution is, and being a true investment as a legal department in a company, is changing the mindset of many general counsel.
Marlene Gebauer (37:11)
Well, if that question was hard, this one might be a little harder.
Greg Lambert (37:14)
Yeah.
Marlene Gebauer (37:15)
This time we’re going to ask you to look into the future.
Manuel Deó (37:17)
Wow.
Marlene Gebauer (37:18)
Our crystal ball question is, what’s the single biggest change you see coming for how firms operate and interact with their clients?
Manuel Deó (37:29)
That’s also a hard one, yeah. I think the single biggest change will be that traditional firms will stop being the only meaningful unit of legal delivery.
Law firms will be important, but they will become more porous. The future legal team will combine small strategic in-house core teams. They will engage traditional firms when they need them, but they will also engage independent senior specialists, specialist boutiques, managed services, and AI agents to deliver legal solutions appropriate to the specifics of that legal need.
Those capabilities will be assembled by each legal department in a dynamic manner around each problem.
I think clients will move from asking, “Which firm should we hire?” to, “What is the best configuration of people, technology, knowledge, and risk for this particular matter?”
The traditional pyramid was designed for a world in which legal knowledge was scarce and coordination was expensive. That will be totally different.
AI makes information, as I said before, increasingly abundant and truly a commodity, in my opinion. Technology makes coordination much cheaper. I think that will change the geometry of the industry.
I think we’ll be seeing legal departments more as trusted orchestrators of capabilities. That’s how I see the future going forward. AI, boring matter, but I know it’s something we always…
Greg Lambert (39:26)
Well, I think you handled both of those questions well.
Marlene Gebauer (39:27)
Yeah, I think you did a great job.
Manuel Deó (39:28)
Yeah.
Greg Lambert (39:30)
Well, Manuel Deó, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to talk to us. This has been great.
Marlene Gebauer (39:37)
Thank you.
Manuel Deó (39:37)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Marlene Gebauer (39:40)
And thanks to all of you for listening. And don’t forget to like and subscribe on Substack, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
Greg Lambert (39:48)
And Manuel, where’s the best place for people to follow your content and to learn more about Ambar?
Manuel Deó (39:54)
Well, the best place to follow me is LinkedIn. I write regularly about the business of law, leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship, and AI.
I also publish a daily newsletter called Dr. No for legal leaders who want to be more innovative, about mental models, about cool stories. Less than a one-minute read each and every day.
Many clients tell me they resend it and forward it to their teams to send specific messages.
And that’s pretty much it. You can find Dr. No on our webpage, ambarpartners.com, under Dr. No.
Marlene Gebauer (40:38)
And as always, the music here is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you, Jerry, and bye, everybody.