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What the MinterEllison announcement means for mid-sized law firms, writes Andrew Cooke.
When MinterEllison announced it was cutting its 2025–26 graduate cohort to 72 – almost one-third fewer than the year before – its chief people officer chose her words carefully: “Client demand remains strong, but the way work gets done is changing, and we are being deliberate about how we shape our workforce.”
That single sentence contains three separate decisions that every mid-sized law firm in Australia is now being asked to make, whether they have recognised it or not. Most have not. Most are still having a conversation about technology. The decisions that actually matter are not about technology at all.
What the announcement is actually telling you
The MinterEllison announcement is not, at its core, a workforce story. It is a business model story.
If AI is performing a meaningful share of the work that previously required a graduate, the firm has two options: pocket the efficiency gain or pass it to the client. The pressure to do both simultaneously is exactly where mid-sized firms are now being squeezed.
Add to this what is already appearing in large commercial contracts on the accounting side – AI-led efficiency discounts written into standard terms by sophisticated client procurement teams – and the shape of the next three years for professional services firms becomes clearer. Clients are not waiting for firms to initiate this conversation. They are inserting it into the fee schedule.
The billable hour was always a proxy for value, not a measure of it. AI has exposed the gap between the two – and your clients’ procurement teams have noticed.
The myth law firms are comfortable believing
MYTH: “Our client relationships are strong enough to protect our fee structures. We will cross the AI pricing bridge when we come to it.”
REALITY: The firms that believe this are the ones most likely to find the bridge has already been crossed without them. Sophisticated commercial clients – the ones that matter most to mid-sized practices – are increasingly aware that AI changes the delivery cost of legal work without changing the value of the advice. When they formalise that observation in a contract, it is no longer a relationship conversation. It is a commercial term. By that point, the negotiating leverage has already shifted.
3 decisions your partnership should make now
The firms I see navigating this transition most effectively have stopped asking which AI tools to evaluate and started asking three questions that a technology vendor cannot answer for them.
1. What are we charging for?
The billable hour is a proxy for expertise and effort. AI disrupts the time component without touching the expertise. Firms that can articulate the value of their professional judgement – independent of the hours required to deliver it – will control their fee conversations. Firms that cannot will find the conversation controlled for them. This is not a pricing model question. It is a clarity of value question, and it starts internally.
2. What are we developing?
The MinterEllison graduate cohort decision carries a long-tail consequence that the announcement did not name. Junior lawyers learn to think like lawyers by doing the work that is now most exposed to automation – document review, research synthesis, drafting under supervision. Automating those tasks without redesigning the development pathway is not an efficiency gain. It is a deferred talent cost. In 10 years, the partners who should be leading mid-sized firms will have learnt their craft differently – or not at all.
3. What are we accountable for?
AI does not hold a practising certificate. The lawyer who reviews, signs, and sends the AI-assisted advice owns it – fully and professionally. The Law Society’s conduct rules and the courts’ expectations of professional competence do not adjust for the source of the work product. Firms without a clear human-review framework for AI-assisted output are not simply taking a technology risk. They are taking a professional conduct risk. That distinction matters for your PI cover, your regulatory standing, and your clients’ trust.
If these three questions are not already on your partnership agenda, the absence is itself information. Not a crisis – an opportunity to get ahead of a conversation that is already underway in your market.
The firms that will lead
The velocity paradox facing professional services firms is real. The urgency to adopt AI is genuine, competitors are moving, and client expectations are shifting. But speed without direction is exposure, not momentum.
The firms that will lead mid-sized legal practice through this transition are not the ones with the most AI tools. They are the ones that have answered the three questions above clearly enough to use any tool with confidence – knowing what they are charging for, what they are building in their people, and what they are professionally accountable for when the work leaves the office.
The MinterEllison headline is about graduate numbers. What it is actually about is what every law firm in Australia is willing to decide about its future – before a client, a regulator, or a competitor decides it first.
Andrew Cooke is the founder and managing director of GPS-AI (Growth & Profit Solutions AI).
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