By Taylor Adriano Chaves
The firm grew its revenue for three consecutive years. It hired new clients, moved offices, and expanded its client base.
And the distribution of profits among partners shrank during the same period.
When someone asks which clients are profitable and which ones consume margin, the answer comes from impressions. Nobody in the office knows how to measure it.
Legal Operations is the discipline that treats the provision of legal services as a measurable operation: standardized processes, productivity and cycle indicators, cost per delivery, data-driven pricing, and technology integrated into the workflow. Its origins lie in corporate legal departments, pressured to justify budgets, and the practice migrated to law firms as clients began demanding cost predictability.
The bottleneck is not technology.
This is the most useful finding from recent research on the sector, and it contradicts the dominant narrative.
The 2026 Trends Panorama for the Legal Sector, a survey by Preâmbulo Tech that polled more than forty Brazilian law firms and legal departments, indicates that 61,4% of professionals identify manual processes and lack of standardization as the main obstacle to digital transformation.
Cost comes in second place, cited by 47,7%. Cultural resistance follows, with 45,5%.
Read the order again. The number one obstacle is not money or people averse to change. It's the absence of a defined process.
The consequence is direct for those who decide to invest. Buying tools before mapping the workflow only automates disorganization, and the office ends up with a paid license and the same rework as before.
It's important to acknowledge the limitations of the data. More than forty respondents is a small sample for a market with hundreds of thousands of lawyers, and the result indicates a trend, not a precise measure. Even so, the order of the obstacles aligns with what is observed in any firm that has tried to implement tools without first designing the workflow.
The adoption has already happened, but the structuring hasn't.
From a technology standpoint, the experimentation cycle has ended.
The 2026 Legal Tech Trends report by NetDocuments indicates that the use of generative artificial intelligence among law firms jumped from 37% in 2024 to 80% in 2025. Among firms with more than seven hundred lawyers, the rate reached 100%.
Adopting is no longer a differentiating factor. What separates profit from expense is what comes after adoption.
Data from Thomson Reuters cited in the same report indicates that offices with a clear and well-communicated AI strategy are 3,9 times more likely to see a return on investment because they combine the tool with training, communication, and internal alignment.
Most Brazilian law firms that have adopted some kind of tool in the last two years are still in the pilot phase. Testing and adjusting is healthy. The problem starts when the pilot never becomes routine, and the tool remains restricted to two or three curious people while the rest of the team continues with the old process.
There is a scale effect that deserves mention. Large firms have the structure to create a dedicated operations area, with a professional who doesn't practice law and is responsible for processes and indicators. Small and medium-sized firms don't have this budget, which pushes expertise within the firm itself. In practice, someone among the partners needs to learn how to do this.
Fixed pricing changes the economics of the office.
The pressure comes from outside, and it is this pressure that makes the operation unavoidable.
The subscription-based fee model is growing in the country, with clients paying a fixed monthly fee for recurring services such as consultations, contract analysis, and case management. For the firm, this means predictable revenue and an ongoing relationship.
It also signifies a reversal of incentives that many banks have not yet processed. In the hourly model, time spent is revenue. In the fixed-price model, time spent is cost.
An agency that doesn't know how much it costs to produce a standard piece of work can't price a subscription without guessing. If they guess too high, they lose the contract. If they guess too low, they win the contract and work for free starting in the sixth month.
The same reasoning applies to mass litigation, where the margin depends on unit cost and success rate per type of claim, and to recurring advisory services, where the scope tends to grow without price renegotiation.
There is no way to achieve a fixed price without measuring the cost per delivery. That's why pricing and Legal Operations are the same subject, even though they appear in separate disciplines.
It's also important to distinguish between two movements that are often confused. Digitizing is transferring what was previously done on paper to the screen. Structuring operations is redesigning what is done, deciding what will no longer be done, and defining who is responsible for each step. The first is a technology project. The second is a partner's decision.
The signs indicate a lack of operation, not a lack of effort.
Some signs appear before the problem turns into a cash flow crisis.
The first is the inability to answer, with numbers, which area or client sustains the result. The perception of an experienced partner is valuable and usually gets the direction right, but gets the size wrong.
Another issue is the lack of a cycle indicator. When no one knows how many days a petition takes from request to filing, there's no way to identify where time is being lost or what automation should address first.
There is also invisible rework, the kind that doesn't show up anywhere because everyone silently redoes each other's work, due to a lack of standardized delivery.
None of these signs indicate a lack of technical competence. They tend to appear precisely in law firms that practice law well, which is why they go unnoticed: the technical results reinforce the perception that everything is in order.
And then there's hiring based on a feeling of being overwhelmed. Hiring because the team is overwhelmed solves the symptom. Without understanding the workflow, the new hire enters the same bottleneck and the profit margin drops again.
The common pattern among all of them is the same. They are design problems, not dedication issues, and therefore cannot be solved by working longer hours. An office with a structural bottleneck that increases working hours only accelerates team burnout.
For whom this type of training makes no sense.
It's important to set honest boundaries, because a management program isn't suitable for everyone, and choosing the wrong one costs time and money.
Those seeking in-depth technical knowledge in a specific area of law need a specialization in that area, not a management course. A tax lawyer who wants to master tax reform has a better option available, and that is not this one.
Those who intend to pursue an academic career or need a degree for research purposes will find a master's degree to be the most suitable path.
And those who lack the autonomy to change processes within their organization will complete the course with good ideas but no opportunity to apply them. Training in operations is only effective when there's room to actually operate.
There are still those who seek this type of course expecting a ready-made pricing formula or contract template that will solve their profit margin problems. That's not what you get. What you get is a method for arriving at your own numbers, which vary according to size, area, and region.
This leaves two profiles. Partners or coordinators who are responsible for the results of a structure, and legal department professionals who need to justify budgets and demonstrate efficiency to the board of directors.
A note on the timing of the decision: Management training is more effective when the firm already has a certain volume of work and some problems to solve, because the student tests the content within their own structure during the course. Those starting out on their own benefit less and make a better deal by investing first in lead generation and technical expertise in their chosen area.
How to evaluate any program in this area.
Four verifiable criteria help compare options without relying on advertising material.
Who teaches? Faculty who operate offices, lead innovation areas, or are responsible for management bring real-world problems into the classroom. A curriculum with only an academic profile often results in discussions of concepts without a solid foundation.
What's on the syllabus? Look for pricing, indicators, jurimetrics, and business modeling explicitly. A program that describes everything as innovation, without naming the technique, tends to deliver a motivational lecture.
How the format works with the routine. An active partner cannot handle a heavy weekly workload. The bi-weekly meeting with asynchronous material exists for this reason.
What comes out of it? A useful program produces deliverables applicable within the organization itself, not just a certificate. It's worth asking, before signing up, exactly what the student takes home at the end of each module.
A fifth criterion, less frequently mentioned but quite practical: who studies together. A class composed of professionals who face the same problem in different contexts is as valuable as the syllabus, because the comparison between structures is usually the part that applies most quickly.
Where is this training available now?
The MBA in Legal Operations and Law Firm Management from IDP was designed for the two profiles described above, and fulfills the four criteria of the previous section.
The curriculum is divided into two axes. The first encompasses strategic planning, financial management and pricing of legal services, governance and compliance, people management, legal marketing, and client experience. The second deals with the structuring of Legal Operations, management by indicators, strategic and mass litigation, use of data, BI and jurimetrics, applications of artificial intelligence in the firm and in the justice system, as well as modeling new businesses, expansion, and mergers and acquisitions between firms.
The faculty verifiably meets the first criterion. Sávio Andrade is a partner in Innovation and Legal Tech at Machado Meyer and Secretary-General of the Innovation and Technology Commission of the São Paulo Bar Association. Daniela Hennemann is CEO of EZZENTIA, specializing in turnaround, mergers and acquisitions, and value creation, with executive training in governance, strategy, and finance from Harvard Business School. Simone Viana Salomão is a managing partner at TOTVS juriTIs, a consulting and HR firm with over thirty years of experience in the legal field.
The course is 100% online with live classes on Mondays and Wednesdays in bi-weekly meetings, totaling 384 hours and a minimum duration of 18 months, with classes starting on August 17, 2026. The course page indicates that there are still some spots available. For transparency, I am writing as a student in the program.
Learn more about the MBA in Legal Operations and Law Firm Management: https://pos.idp.edu.br/products/mba-em-legal-operations-e-gestao-de-escritorios-de-advocacia
References
Panorama of Trends for the Legal Sector 2026, by Preâmbulo Tech, with more than 40 law firms and legal departments surveyed, shows a doubling of AI use in two years, and percentages of 61,4% for manual processes and lack of standardization, 47,7% for costs, and 45,5% for cultural resistance: https://jornalempresasenegocios.com.br/especial/panorama-de-tendencias-para-o-setor-juridico-2026/
NetDocuments' 2026 Legal Tech Trends report shows a jump from 37% in 2024 to 80% in 2025 in the use of generative AI, a 100% rate in law firms with more than 700 lawyers, and data from Thomson Reuters indicating a 3,9 times greater likelihood of ROI with a clear and communicated strategy: https://www.inspire-se.co/en/recursos/blog/tendencias-legaltech-2026
