The Da Vinci dilemma: where do elite lawyers add value in an AI world? With AI handling greater volumes of legal work, law firm.

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In a strategy discussion with partners of an elite European law firm, one asked how many assistants Leonardo da Vinci had. I didn’t know.

He explained that da Vinci worked with a team of around 20, focusing himself only on what that mattered most: painting the face and the hands.

He had taken the same approach in his own career. The question, he said, was how technology would change this and who would do the rest.

We were discussing the increasing standardisation of legal work and the pressure on the traditional law firm model.

Today, that context is broader and more immediate. Legal work is not only becoming more standardised; it is being broken into component parts, distributed across a wider range of providers and increasingly delivered through technology.

AdvertisementAI is not the origin of this shift, but it is accelerating it at pace. The issue is no longer whether legal work will change, it already has. The more important question is: in an AI-enabled legal system, where does the elite partner add the ‘da Vinci’ value – the face and

hands of the matter?

Understanding value in an AI future

In preparing for the IBA Leadership Academy with the faculty this year, one question has surfaced repeatedly.

Traditionally, value was inferred – reflected in the expertise of the lawyer and the reputation of the firm. The partnership model reinforced this, with profit per partner as its most visible signal.

Time multiplied by hourly rates became a proxy for value, even if widely understood to be imperfect.

Over the past decade, elite firms have grown in both size and profitability, making it easier to overlook the tension at the heart of the model.

The link between time and value is weakening, yet the system remains anchored to it. Tasks that once required significant effort can now be completed faster, more consistently and, in some cases, differently altogether.

At the same time, clients are modernising. They are less concerned with how work is done and more focused on what it achieves.

Value is shifting away from execution and towards judgement: framing complex problems, making decisions under uncertainty and, critically, adding their ‘reputational’ weight.

Clients are not only seeking answers; they are seeking assurance. In higher-stakes matters, what is being purchased is not simply legal, but confidence that a senior, accountable professional stands behind it.

That element of accountability – of carrying risk – remains difficult to replicate and may become more valuable as the underlying work becomes more accessible and also with a perceived ‘system-risk’.

Returning to the da Vinci analogy, the ‘face and hands’ work is not simply the most complex work. It is the work where judgement is required, outcomes are uncertain and responsibility sits most heavily.

What falls outside the ‘face and hands’?

If this is where value sits, an increasing proportion of legal work – while necessary – does not require direct partner involvement.

The traditional model treated a wide range of work as broadly similar, with the partner overseeing the whole. That assumption is becoming harder to sustain for work that can be standardised, decomposed into repeatable steps or delivered more efficiently through systems or alternative providers.

This is not ‘low value’ work. Much of it is critical. But it is different in nature: it supports the matter rather than defines its value.

Who does the rest?

Which brings us back to the original question.

If the partner focuses on the ‘face and hands’, who does the rest?

In the past, the answer was straightforward. The work remained within the firm, delivered through leveraged teams.The difficulty is that many firms are approaching this from the wrong starting point. The focus has been on technology, introduced from the bottom up, rather than on how legal work is being disaggregated across the value chain.

The question is not simply who does the rest, but how that work should be structured and where it should sit.

Today, it may remain within the firm, but in different roles or structures. It may sit in separate units, lower-cost centres or alternative providers. In some cases, it may sit with the client. Increasingly, it will be supported – or delivered – through systems within a wider legal ecosystem.

The boundaries of the firm are becoming less clear – the challenge is not whether work moves, but where it moves and how it is coordinated. This mirrors developments in other sectors, where complex products and services are assembled across specialised providers

rather than delivered within a single organisation.

In practice, many firms already operate this way. The highest-value work is often bundled with supporting work required to win or deliver the mandate. The question is not whether this happens, but whether it is done deliberately, profitably and within a clear operating model.

Implications for the firm

The key question is not whether work should remain inside the firm, but which work must remain because it defines the firm’s value and which should be delivered differently.

Different answers will lead to different models. Some firms will focus narrowly on high-

value, judgement-intensive work. Others will combine this with more systematised

delivery. Some will remain integrated; others will operate across a broader ecosystem.

For firms focusing on high-value work, this typically means a narrower scope, lower leverage, deeper specialisation and tighter integration between partners and clients.

There will be no single point of convergence. What matters is not the model chosen, but whether the choice is made deliberately.

In many firms, change is emerging through incremental decisions – new tools, pricing adjustments, evolving delivery – without a clear view of what the firm is becoming.

Competitive advantage will not come from technology alone, but from aligning the firm’s

model – its structure, capabilities and ways of working – with the value it has chosen to

provide.

The leadership challenge

These are not abstract issues. They translate into concrete leadership choices about what is

valued, measured and rewarded.

Most firms continue to recognise performance through time and utilisation. The emerging

model places greater emphasis on outcomes, coordination and forms of contribution not captured in hours.

This creates a tension that is now widely felt: firms are asking for new behaviours while continuing to reward the old.

This places a premium on collaboration. As work becomes more disaggregated, value is created not only through individual expertise but through the ability to combine, share and apply knowledge across the firm. In that sense, collaboration becomes an economic capability, not simply a cultural aspiration.

The traditional levers of law firm profitability are not aligned with how value is now created. It is not surprising that progress is uneven.

The first step is recognising that standing still is not an option. The second is forming a sufficiently clear view of the future to justify the effort and risk involved. The third is translating that direction into practical changes – how work is structured, priced, developed and measured.

This extends beyond strategy. It requires changes in governance, incentives and, most difficult of all, culture.

It also raises a further question: how the next generation of lawyers will be trained if the work on which that training depended is no longer done in the same way.

A more precise partner role

The role of the elite lawyer does not disappear. If anything, it becomes more clearly defined. What changes is how that role is expressed.

In some firms, the partner will focus narrowly on the highest-value elements – defining

the problem, shaping the solution, exercising judgement and taking responsibility.

In others, the role will extend into coordinating work across a disaggregated system – integrating inputs and ensuring the whole delivers for the client.

These choices have direct implications for structure. Some firms will increase leverage, using AI to extend reach. Others will reduce it, relying on fewer, more capable lawyers moving faster up the value curve. New roles will emerge, combining legal and technical capabilities.

In each case, the emphasis shifts away from overseeing the whole process towards focusing

on where value is actually created.

Conclusion

It is tempting to describe these developments in terms of technology, innovation or

disruption. More precisely, they represent a shift in how value is created, recognised and

delivered and therefore in the models required to support it.

The question posed by Michael E. Schneider, founding partner of LALIVE and now senior

counsel – our original ‘da Vinci partner’ – remains the right one, but it now demands a

more urgent answer: in an AI-enabled world, what are the ‘face and hands’ of legal work

and who, or what, does the rest?

The future of law is being redesigned. Law firms are not simply adapting; they are being

forced to reconsider where they add value and how that value is delivered.

These questions go to the heart of how firms define their strategy, organise their work and

lead their people. They are also the questions we will be working through at the IBA

Leadership Academy in London, as we examine how value is changing and what that

means for the future role of the firm and the lawyers within it.