That firm’s “platform model” enables an umbrella brand to contract with independent practices that provide legal services on a consultancy basis, taking home around 70 per cent or more of receivables, with the remaining share going to a centralised platform for admin, IT, branding and other support services.

James Stevens — who is the founder and managing director of GTC Legal Group, which includes GTC Lawyers — believes that such revenue-sharing platform models are “the way of the future” for Australian legal practices.

“Revenue-sharing models are predicted to be doing one-third of all legal work in the UK within three years, with over a hundred platform model firms trading there already. In Australia so far, there’s Keypoint, and there’s GTC. I have no doubt that very soon there will be dozens more like us,” he proclaimed.

GTC Lawyers, Mr Stevens detailed, currently has 30 consulting principals, who are focused on family law, criminal law, corporate crime, commercial law, contested wills, traffic law and admin law.

That firm, which was founded in 2009, began as a legal referral service by operating a fully resourced legal hotline service that gives people access to free legal advice from practising lawyers from 7am to midnight, seven days a week.

In a statement, GTC said that it now receives around 80,000 legal inquiries to its hotline annually and uses the referrals from this hotline to operate nationally across the aforementioned practice areas.

As a group, GTC includes a “traditional model law firm” in Armstrong Legal, a “non-traditional consultant model law firm” in GTC Lawyers, an agency network of approximately 1,500 network partners in All Courts Lawyers, and a front and back-office service company, GTC Legal Group Services, that utilises custom-built technology on the Salesforce platform to deliver efficiencies and drive productivity, known as NebuLAW.

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Mr Stevens said that he believes that the platform model can “greatly benefit sole practitioners across the country who struggle with the administrative side of their business, and don’t have enough time to do what they got into the profession for in the first place — the law!”

“Australia has one of the most fragmented legal professions in the world, with an average of only three lawyers per firm,” he mused.

“This means the vast majority of lawyers working in Australia today just don’t have access to the economies of scale they need to actually practice law instead of wasting time and energy doing non-billable administrative work.”

Moreover, Mr Stevens added, most platform firms in the UK don’t refer you work, whereas his does.

“In addition to all the admin, IT and accounting services we provide, GTC Lawyers will send you red-hot leads from our national legal hotline, whenever someone in your area needs a lawyer. These leads have already been given advice, assessed and vetted by our hotline lawyers,” he outlined.

“You can choose to put only this work through GTC Lawyers as a consulting principal, or you can put all your firm’s work through us and make your life easier by letting us take care of all of your trust accounting, office accounting and all non-billable work. It’s totally up to you.

“That’s just part of the unparalleled flexibility that the consultancy model provides.”