AFAs, Efficiency, and a Shrinking Argument

This week on The Geek in Review, we talk with Kristina Satkunas of CounselLink about what the numbers are saying in a legal market that still talks about change while clinging hard to old billing habits. Kris discusses the hard data behind outside counsel spend, drawing on CounselLink invoice data and Harbor survey results to compare what legal departments say they expect with what the bills are already showing. She makes the case that the objective data is stubbornly clear. Rates are rising, demand is not falling, and the biggest firms continue to capture a larger share of work.

There is a widening gap between hope and reality. Legal departments may believe they are on the verge of controlling outside counsel costs, moving more work in house, or shifting matters to smaller firms, but Satkunas notes that the billing data has not caught up to those ambitions. She sees some room for in-house expansion in more routine areas like employment work, especially with AI helping legal teams absorb more volume, yet the largest and most sensitive matters are still flowing to outside counsel. That tension gives the episode much of its energy. Everyone sees pressure building in the system, but the old habits of legal buying and legal staffing remain firmly in place.

The discussion also gets into the mechanics of better decision-making, and where there is practical value for legal operations leaders. Satkunas emphasizes that data only becomes useful when departments have enough discipline in their enterprise legal management systems to categorize work correctly, clean out outliers, and separate different matter types instead of lumping everything into broad buckets like litigation. She also explains why finance data alone will not do the job. The real insight sits inside invoice-level detail, where hours, rates, firms, and timekeepers reveal what is happening beneath the headline spend numbers. For listeners trying to build a stronger legal ops function, this part of the conversation feels like a polite but firm warning that dirty data still tells stories, but some of them are fiction.

There is an obvious strain on the billable hour model that AI is placing on it. Satkunas notes that while average partner rate growth has hovered around 5 percent, top-end lawyers are often raising rates even faster, especially as firms try to protect revenue from the work and people they still believe clients will pay for. At the same time, she argues that alternative fee arrangements have remained stuck for years, though AI may finally force movement toward value-based pricing. If technology reduces the hours required to complete the work, then the old logic behind both hourly billing and many flat fees starts to wobble. That leaves firms facing an uncomfortable question, which is how to price legal services based on value delivered rather than time consumed.

We'd say that Satkunas is neither cheerleader nor doomsayer. She is a patient observer of a market trying to pretend nothing is happening while the floorboards creak under everyone’s feet. Her prediction is that real value-based billing will begin to appear in pockets over the next couple of years, even as firms continue squeezing what they can from the billable hour in the meantime. For law firm leaders, legal ops teams, and general counsel, this episode is a sharp reminder that disruption does not arrive with a trumpet blast. Sometimes it arrives as a spreadsheet, a trend line, and a guest who quietly points out that the data has been trying to warn us for years.

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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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