The US$20 billion (and counting) legal market Australian firms want a piece of
Australian law firms are expanding their use of technology to provide legal services as a way to ‘future-fit’ their businesses as clients demand more bang for their per-hour buck.
Major Australian law firms including Allens, Ashurst and Herbert Smith Freehills are expanding their dedicated in-house ‘alternative legal services’ teams as they seek to do more for less with their advice.
Alternative legal services consist of a broad umbrella of client engagements that typically involves labour-intensive grunt work: from electronic discovery and legal research to document review and coding. While the term itself stems from the work being outsourced to alternative legal service providers, or ASLPs, blue ribbon law firms have increasingly launched and grown in-house practices and harnessed new technologies tailored to client needs.
It’s a money-making move with a global market worth USD20.6 billion. Internationally, the alternative legal services market has been bubbling away for more than a decade, with Herbert Smith Freehills and Ashurst launching practices in the UK prior to the “legal gold rush” that brought them to Australia, leading them to offer those practices locally.
In the last month, Herbert Smith Freehills and Ashurst announced expansions to their alternative legal services teams, supporting the firms’ disputes and transactions teams. Herbert Smith Freehills now has a global team of 350 – with nearly a third based in Australia.
