Enjoy a front-row seat as Chris speaks with thought-provoking C-Suite executives and leaders from corporations, both public and private, professional service firms, and of course, the legal industry from around the United States.
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EP #83: There's No Way We'll Do That: Mark Wasserman on the Transatlantic Merger That Built Eversheds Sutherland
mardi 15 septembre 2026 • Durée 31:58
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
EP #82: Empathy Is a Hard Skill: Reena SenGupta on the Frozen Middle, Jevons Paradox, and the Future of Legal Work
mardi 1 septembre 2026 • Durée 44:03
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
EP #81: Watching BigLaw Reinvent Itself with Gina Passarella & David Gialanella
mardi 18 août 2026 • Durée 44:45
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
EP #80: The Diminishing Few: Why Being a Top Independent UK Firm Is Now a Competitive Advantage
mardi 4 août 2026 • Durée 34:23
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
EP #79: Law Is Still a People Business: Gary Wingens on Leadership, Loyalty, and the Long View
mardi 21 juillet 2026 • Durée 42:20
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
Connect with Gary Wingens:
EP #78: Trying to Stop a Waterfall: Capital AI, and The New Legal Market
mardi 7 juillet 2026 • Durée 37:06
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
EP #77: Aprio Legal: How Two ABS Firms Combined to Build America's First Integrated Legal + Accounting Platform
mardi 16 juin 2026 • Durée 43:13
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
EP #76: Not All Capital Is the Same: Inside Burford Capital with David Perla
mardi 2 juin 2026 • Durée 50:24
When permanent capital, AI disruption, and a rapidly fracturing talent market collide inside the legal industry, the old rules for how law firms grow, get funded, and build their next generation of lawyers stop making sense.
David Perla, Vice Chair of Burford Capital, joins hosts Chris Batz and Howard Rosenberg to break down why permanent capital is a fundamentally different proposition than traditional private equity for boutiques and founder-controlled firms ready to grow, and why the AmLaw 100 is unlikely to move anytime soon.
The more urgent conversation is about what neither capital nor strategy can fully solve. Law firm leaders are making multi-year associate class decisions without any reliable sense of what their workforce looks like in twelve months. Startups that needed fifty people eighteen months ago now run on seven or eight. The associate pipeline, in-house departments, recruiting timelines: all of it is under pressure that is accelerating faster than most leaders want to admit.
Perla's advice is deceptively simple. Get curious. Ask hard questions of people who think differently. The firms that navigate this moment well are the ones willing to challenge assumptions before the market forces the issue.
Episode Breakdown:
00:00 Introduction: David Perla, Vice Chair of Burford Capital
06:05 Building Pangea3 and Pioneering Legal Outsourcing
12:51 How Burford Capital Invests in the Legal Industry
23:44 Where Private Capital Is Heading in Law Firm Investment
29:51 AI, Legal Talent, and the Associate Pipeline Crisis
39:23 Legal Tech Valuations and the Coming Shakeout
46:06 Advice for Law Firm Leaders Navigating Disruption
EP #75: Fiercely Independent for 137 Years: Hughes Hubbard's Strategy in the Age of AI, Private Equity, and Rebalancing the Firm
mardi 12 mai 2026 • Durée 29:12
What happens to the modern law firm when AI strips away the advantage of size and leaves judgment as the true measure of value?
Robb Patryk joined Chris Batz and Howard Rosenberg to talk about why AI may reset some of the biggest assumptions in the legal industry. If sophisticated legal work no longer depends on armies of lawyers, what actually gives a firm its edge? For Robb, the answer is clear. Sharp judgment, trusted client relationships, and a strategy that knows exactly which problems a firm is built to solve.
This conversation gets to the real pressure point behind all the AI hype. What happens to training when junior lawyers no longer learn through hours of document review? What happens to growth when bigger no longer means better? Robb makes the case for a more deliberate future where independent firms can stay competitive, stay focused, and stay human while using AI to move faster and think better.
There is also a bigger leadership question running through this episode. How do you protect a firm's identity when the market keeps pushing toward consolidation, private equity, and scale at all costs? Robb offers a grounded look at what it takes to lead with conviction in a moment when the legal world feels wide open.
Episode Breakdown:
00:00 AI in Law Firms and the Future of Independent Firms
08:02 Law Firm Strategy, Growth, and Practice Mix
12:33 How AI Will Reshape Legal Talent and Firm Scale
16:09 Private Equity, Non-Lawyer Ownership, and Law Firm Culture
23:45 How Independent Law Firms Stay Competitive
EP #74: US Only by Design: Why Polsinelli Stays Domestic with Chase Simmons
mardi 28 avril 2026 • Durée 40:54
What does it take to grow a 1,200-lawyer firm through chaos, competition, and industry change without losing the culture and discipline that made it strong in the first place?
Hosts Chris Batz and Howard Rosenberg sit down with Chase Simmons, Chair and CEO of Polsinelli, for a thoughtful conversation about leadership under pressure. As the leader of one of the largest full-service U.S.-focused law firms, Chase brings a clear point of view on growth, judgment, and the kind of institutional clarity that gets tested when the market shifts.
The conversation gets to the heart of how firms grow without losing themselves. Chase shares why Polsinelli has stayed intentionally U.S. focused, how leadership teams decide where to invest and where to hold back, and what hard moments can reveal about a firm's values. What helps a firm stay disciplined when the market keeps shifting? What becomes possible when leaders know who they are and refuse to chase every opportunity?
Chris and Howard also ask Chase about private equity, AI, succession, and the broader disruption reshaping big law. What emerges is a thoughtful discussion about stewardship, ambition, and the choices that give a firm staying power. It is a grounded look at leadership from someone who has helped scale a major firm while staying protective of the culture behind it.
Episode Breakdown:
00:00 Polsinelli's Growth Strategy and Leadership Vision
03:08 Building a Law Firm Culture That Holds Up Under Pressure
11:56 The Future of Big Law and Industry Disruption
14:59 AI and the Changing Practice of Law
17:54 Private Equity and the Future of Law Firm Ownership
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