Tools & Strategies for Consultant Lawyers & Platform Firms

By 2026, 33% of UK lawyers could transition to consultancy law, reshaping the legal industry. The consultancy model is an increasingly popular career path for lawyers, emphasising its benefits, such as flexibility and self-employment. The notion that rigid law firm models of partnerships, LLPs and Limited Companies are the only way forward has long gone. Identifying the right business model is crucial for legal professionals transitioning to become consultant lawyers. The pace of growth in consultant lawyers is accelerating and shows no sign of abating anytime soon.

What is a consultant lawyer?

A consultant lawyer specialises in a specific legal niche and remains independent but supported while managing their workload and achieving a work-life balance that suits their needs. Consultant solicitors can set their fees and hours, and the support provided by the platform law firm enhances their operational freedom.

While consultant lawyers (also called Freelance lawyers and fractional General Counsel/Fractional GC) are self-employed, they depend on support and services provided by a platform law firm.

Strategies for consultant lawyers and platform firms

What are platform law firms?

Platform law firms provide back-office support, infrastructure, and regulatory compliance, which allows the consultant lawyer to operate independently and collaboratively.

This relatively recent model of operation allows the consultant lawyer to grow their practice at their own pace. The platform law firm benefits from a share of the fee income from the business conducted by the consultant lawyer it supports. These solicitors enjoy significant benefits, such as higher earnings potential and access to office facilities, which offer greater flexibility and autonomy than traditional law positions.

However, to be successful, the platform firms must offer systems and services that provide their consultant lawyers with transparency and promote productivity and profitable growth.

This article considers the essential tools and strategies consultant lawyers can use to run their independent practice successfully and what systems and services platform law firms supporting them need to provide to foster growth and profitability.

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Understanding the shared challenges

The common aim of the consultant lawyer and platform law firm is for the collaboration to succeed. However, as with any business, there always need to be trade-offs. The needs of the consultant lawyer must be balanced against the requirements of the platform law firm to enable both to prosper.

Challenges for consultant lawyers

Managing a workload is always a challenge. In addition to conducting the actual legal work, consultant lawyers need to organise things such as setting priorities, managing a diary, and billing for their work. Investment in and organisation of systems to manage these tasks takes time and attention away from the actual legal work. Consultant lawyers focus on the legal work they wish to carry out rather than the administrative and regulatory overhead traditional law firms face.

The back-office systems and support taken for granted by many law firms take time and effort to get right. If left to their own devices in their firms, consultant lawyers would need to spend time setting up and managing these and carrying out their legal work.

One key attraction of becoming a consultant lawyer is the ability to design your work-life balance. However, if consultant lawyers also needed to manage the systems and services that allow them to operate, they could never correctly achieve their desired work-life balance.

Challenges for platform firm owners

Productivity management is a massive challenge for platform firm owners. They must ensure their consultant lawyer provides consistent, productive service. They cannot simply leave their consultant lawyers to their own devices. This means systems must be in place to easily monitor activity and track the progress of cases being handled by their consultant lawyers.

Quality control is another essential element of the oversight activity platform law firms must have available. Lack of effective quality control can cause financial and reputational harm.

Platform law firms want to support their consultant lawyers without burdensome interference. To do that, they need to implement systems that allow the consultant lawyers to do their jobs while affording the level of oversight necessary to protect the platform law firm and enable it to flourish. This means developing workflows, checklists, and templates that make it easy for the consultant lawyer to progress efficiently and effectively.

In an ideal situation, the platform law firm easily monitors the consultant lawyer’s activity using systems like Clio’s productivity reports. This allows platform law firms, including consultant lawyers, to view client and user productivity. Matter Reports can quickly establish the progress of each case being dealt with by the consultant lawyer. In contrast, the realisation report can give the platform law firm detailed information on the consultant lawyers’ billable and non-billable time.

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Essential tools for consultant lawyers and platform firms

Whilst consistency of operation is essential, different consultant lawyers will work in various ways. On the other hand, platform law firms will look for a degree of uniformity and conformity to policies along with the ability to monitor and manage the consultant lawyer’s productivity and revenue generation properly.

Comprehensive support services enable consultant lawyers to focus on their clients without distractions.

Tools must benefit both without being overly burdensome or complicated to use. Case and practice management software is one of the most essential tools the consultant lawyer and the platform law firm can use.

Case and practice management software

Using the proper case and practice management software for the consultant lawyer and platform law firm is critical to the operation’s success. Making the wrong selection can impact productivity and profitability. As always, there are tensions between the needs of the consultant lawyer and the management requirements of the platform law firm.

Case and practice management for the consultant lawyer

The consultant lawyer aims to work for the clients who engage them. They do not want to be overburdened by admin while capturing the information they need and processing their work on a daily basis. This is where an effective case and practice management system comes into its own.

To work effectively, consultant lawyers need to capture and reuse the data they need for each case they work on. Client onboarding and data capture must be straightforward and easily retrievable for future use.

Effective matter management systems provide consultant lawyers with the tools to manage their daily workload. These include task setting and management, diary and appointment management, workflows and checklists, and a template bank for producing documents.

Revenue generation and profitably conducting work are key elements for a successful consultant lawyer. However, the mechanics of time recording, bill creation, and recovery are administration overheads the consultant lawyers do not need. Reliance on an effective billing and collections system is critical for the consultant lawyer to get on with the legal work. The system will enable the lawyer to deal with bill generation and recovery. What is essential is that the consultant lawyer has access to a billing and recovery system that gets them paid faster!

The final element is ease of access and use. High functionality is undoubtedly required, but ease of access and use are critical, too. If accessing the case and practice management system takes too long or is overly complex, this will likely impact the consultant lawyer’s performance.

Case and practice management for the platform law firm

The common aim of the consultant lawyer and platform law firm is to carry out legal work efficiently, effectively and profitably. However, whilst consultant lawyers will focus on the actual legal work, platform law firms need to focus on providing an environment and systems that allow their consultant lawyers to produce quality, profitable legal work quickly. This can be more complicated than it seems.

Choosing the proper case and practice management system is critical to operating a successful platform law firm. Systems that are overly complex and difficult to access and work with will doom the platform law firm to failure.

Platform law firms need a case and practice management system that allows their consultant lawyers to operate independently and provides monitoring tools to track case progress without interfering with the consultant lawyer’s daily workload.

Monitoring and managing client onboarding to support the consultant lawyer in building a client base is hugely important. The easier it is to onboard clients successfully, the more likely the consultant lawyer will grow the business.

Providing the matter management tools consultant lawyers need will help them be more efficient. Task, diary, appointment management, document production, and case scheduling are critical for the consultant lawyer’s operation. Effective matter management software will provide these tools and more to enable consultant lawyers to manage their caseloads efficiently.

Fast access to detailed information is essential for platform law firms. Systems that provide productivity reports across clients, users, matters, and billing areas will give these firms the information they need to effectively manage and nurture their consultant lawyers.

How Clio helps: Clio Manage streamlines case management, automates admin tasks, and offers centralised reporting for firm owners.

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Client portals for secure communication

One of the most frustrating aspects of legal work is how effectively lawyers and clients communicate. Clients are always keen to know about the latest progress of their cases, and the challenge of communicating that information can impact the business’s performance. Clients do not want to be restricted to a 9 a.m.–5 p.m. window to determine how their cases progress. They are looking for 24/7 access to enquire about their cases whenever it’s convenient for them. This has an impact on consultant lawyers and platform law firms.

Client portals for consultant lawyers

A client portal provides the consultant lawyer with a massive advantage. It means that information on the current state of play is always available to the client whenever they want it.

This reduces the time the consultant lawyer spends giving the client an update by phone, email, text, or WhatsApp. It allows consultant lawyers to interact with clients, providing them with documents to review and feedback. Clients can also leave messages and ask questions about their cases. The consultant lawyer can respond in the client portal, keeping everything within the case management system and available for review.

Client portals for platform law firms

Keeping all client and lawyer communications centralised in a client portal simplifies monitoring and management. With all communications in the client portal, platform law firms can quickly review the interaction between the consultant lawyer and the client. This allows intervention where necessary where communications are not compliant with the platform firm’s policies. It also offers excellent training opportunities if communication is lacking, less than the standard the platform law firm expects, or if regulatory guidance has been breached.

How Clio helps: Clio’s Client Portal enables secure sharing of case updates and documents, ensuring clear and efficient client communication.

Time recording, legal billing, and online payments

Tracking time spent on client legal work is essential to revenue generation. Both consultant lawyers and platform law firms are interested in ensuring this process is as seamless and efficient as possible.

Time tracking, billing and payments for consultant lawyers

When time is tracked as a case progresses, generating interim or final invoices is simple. Consultant lawyers operating in this way do not spend endless hours toting up time spent and assembling charges for different activities. Bills that can be generated quickly and easily from information already held within the case and practice management system mean it takes little time to issue a bill.

Managing their clients effectively is crucial for consultant lawyers, as it ensures smooth operations and client satisfaction.

Importantly, bill collection should also be simple, with options for clients to pay online. Clio payments make bill collection simple and effective, allowing clients to pay their bills anytime and anywhere.

Time tracking, billing and payments for platform law firms

Platform law firms must manage work in progress, revenue generation and bill collection for themselves and their consultant lawyers. Consultant lawyers only benefit financially once a bill has been collected, so platform law firms must operate an effective billing and payment system.

Once platform law firms establish firm financial management policies and practices, they can run billing and payment reports and allocate payments to their consultant lawyers quickly and efficiently.

A system that tracks outstanding bills and follows up with clients to encourage payment is crucial for cash flow management. By making the collections process fast, automated and convenient, clients will pay quicker when an online payment option is offered.

How Clio helps: Clio Payments allows for automated invoicing, late payment reminders, and seamless payment processing.

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Document automation and cloud storage

Every case and practice management system must have an effective document management system. This includes document automation and storage.

Document automation and cloud storage for consultant lawyers

Access to document templates is crucial for practising lawyers, especially consultant lawyers who work on their cases. The availability of relevant, current templates to generate documents allows for efficiency and increased productivity.

In addition, automated processes drawing in documents improve communication and ease of client and contact management.

Once created, documents are stored against the client and matter, allowing fast retrieval and review.

The final element in document generation and retrieval is accessing these documents anytime from anywhere with an accessible cloud-based case and practice management system.

Document automation and cloud storage for platform law firms

Promoting the efficiency of their consultant lawyers is key to the enterprise. Managing centralised templates for document production and storage in a cloud-based case and practice management system allows for excellent quality control.

Consultant lawyers can easily and quickly access the latest, most up-to-date templates, ensuring that outdated templates are retired.

Secure, centralised cloud storage, managed by the platform law firm, also promotes document review and retrieval efficiency by their consultant lawyers.

How Clio helps: Clio’s document automation features help lawyers create error-free contracts quickly, while cloud storage ensures easy retrieval.

Effective strategies for operational efficiency

Operational efficiency is vital for both consultant lawyers and platform law firms. The key to their success is using a case and practice management system to drive efficiencies.

Operational efficiency for consultant lawyers

The key challenge for consultant lawyers is dealing with administrative or repetitive tasks, which take time and reduce their time when dealing with the essential legal work they wish to undertake.

The key to boosting efficiency is automating routine tasks as much as possible. For example, legal automation can be introduced to the client onboarding process to address all aspects of client intake.

Using templates and automated document production rather than creating every document from scratch promotes efficient working practices. This allows the consultant lawyer to spend more time focusing on the legal aspects of a case.

Updating clients can take time away from productive legal work. When consultant lawyers use a client portal to keep clients updated, it reduces the time spent on the phone or getting involved in email, text or WhatsApp exchanges.

Operational efficiency for platform law firms

Platform law firms must efficiently support multiple consultant lawyers. Otherwise, the whole enterprise will collapse!

A compelling, cloud-based case and practice management system allows platform firms to support consultant lawyers across various legal subject areas. The flexibility of creating templates and workflows for different legal areas will enable consultants to focus on their field of law without distraction.

Also key to the enterprise is using a case and practice management system that can scale and support multiple consultant lawyers operating remotely in their fields.

Implementing automation in many areas, including efficient billing and collection, allows consultant lawyers to focus on legal work while the platform law firm manages the enterprise’s administration.

How Clio supports both: By integrating case management, billing, and communication tools, Clio enables efficient, scalable operations.

Work-life balance: How technology helps

Many consultant lawyers are attracted to this type of work because it allows them to manage their work-life balance. They decide where and when to work. They can decide whether to work from home or another location, even abroad! They are not tied to an office to carry out their legal work. Consultant lawyers are self-employed, but being part of a platform law setup allows the firm to handle repetitive administration tasks, allowing the consultant lawyer to focus on legal work.

This all depends on the platform law firm using a cloud-based case and practice management system that provides the flexibility, scalability and functionality that allows for this.

Removing the burden of repetitive administrative tasks helps the consultant lawyer achieve a work-life balance not ordinarily available to lawyers in traditional law firms.

Tip: Clio’s mobile access and automation features enable lawyers to work smarter, not longer.

Next steps

33% of lawyers are expected to become consultant lawyers by 2026. The attraction of working independently and having a work-life balance you design yourself whilst being supported by a platform law firm that provides the tools, system and support allowing you to do that is a massive attraction for many lawyers.

Most lawyers only want to carry out the legal work. They are not interested in the administration of a large law firm involving people and systems management. They can now realise this ambition with the support of a platform law firm that engages with and relies on a case and practice management system that affords the consultant lawyer the freedom to practise law whilst providing a supportive, efficient and effective back-office environment.

Whether you are an aspiring consultant lawyer or a platform law firm owner, it pays to look at what’s available to support both ends of your business.

Book a demo with Clio to discover how its tools can streamline daily operations and improve productivity.