Originally published on LinkedIn on 30 April 2026.
This edition of the Leadership Blind Spot Brief was inspired by a recent Thomson Reuters Institute article on AI and the future of legal talent. I have tagged Norah Olson Bluvshtein and Thomson Reuters Institute whose research directly informed the argument here.
A recent Thomson Reuters Institute article posed a question that most law firm leaders are not yet asking about themselves.
Norah Olson Bluvshtein, Chief Legal Operations Officer at Fredrikson & Byron, is asking not just how AI will change the way legal work gets done but how it will change the way legal work gets paid for. It’s a more consequential question and one that cuts to the heart of where law firms are most exposed.
The article’s conclusion is striking. As AI compresses time and automates the tasks that once defined junior associate work, the skills that will determine the next generation of great lawyers are not technical ones. They are human ones: judgment, curiosity, client relationships, the ability to read a room and build trust over time. Legal innovation consultant Anastasia Boyko Anastasia Boyko puts it plainly. The skills needed to be a good lawyer are no longer the rote skills that AI can automate. They are the people skills, the operational skills, and the client skills.
This is the right conclusion. There is however a question the article does not ask.
The missing half of the conversation
Who is responsible for developing those qualities in the next generation of great lawyers? Their supervising partner? Their practice leader? The managing partner setting the tone for how the firm operates day to day?
Whoever the answer is, it raises an uncomfortable question for every firm currently investing in human skills development. Do the leaders responsible for modelling those skills have an accurate picture of how they are actually experienced by the people around them? Not how they intend to come across, but how they land.
In the meeting where a fee earner decides whether to speak or stay quiet. In the feedback conversation where an associate decides whether to push back or comply. In the moment a junior lawyer watches how their supervising partner handles ambiguity, pressure, and uncertainty and draws conclusions about what good judgment looks like.
Research by organisational psychologist Tasha Eurich, drawn from a five-year programme, found that although 95% of people believe they are self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually are. More striking still, senior leaders are less likely to be in this bracket. The more senior a leader becomes, the harder it is to gather honest feedback and seniority is precisely what makes accurate self-awareness harder to achieve because the more senior you become, the more filtered the information reaching you will be.
Leaders are always modelling something. The question is whether what they are modelling matches what they think they are modelling. That gap between intent and impact is where human skills development either takes root or quietly fails.
You cannot build what you cannot model
Norah Olson Bluvshtein and Anastasia Boyko, writing in the Thomson Reuters Institute, are clear on this point. The firms pulling ahead are prioritising curiosity, openness, and sound judgment in the lawyers they recruit and develop.
The pressures shaping their talent strategy are not unique to the American market. UK law firms are navigating the same forces and the same question applies on this side of the Atlantic. These are the right priorities, but there is a structural vulnerability in this approach that the research does not name.
Human skills in a team are not developed in isolation. They develop or they don’t in response to the environment leadership creates around them. A team led by a partner who models genuine curiosity, who invites challenge, and who responds to uncertainty with considered judgment will gradually internalise those behaviours as the standard. Not because of a training programme, but because people learn less from what they are taught and more from what they observe being demonstrated and rewarded by the people above them.
The reverse is equally true and considerably more common.
A team whose leader has blind spots about how their behaviour lands, whose high standards read as criticism, whose decisiveness reads as dismissal, whose composure under pressure reads as indifference, will adapt accordingly. They become more cautious. Less willing to offer an unfinished idea. Less likely to surface a judgment call before they are certain of the answer.
None of this is intentional. The leader is not trying to suppress judgment or discourage curiosity but the gap between what they intend and how they are experienced is doing exactly that, quietly and invisibly, whilst the environment the firm is relying on to develop the next generation of great lawyers is the same environment the blind spots are shaping.
There are firms where this is already being addressed deliberately. They have invested in honest feedback structures, in coaching cultures, and in the kind of psychological safety that allows concerns to travel upward before they become expensive. They are doing it because someone made a deliberate decision to examine what most firms leave unexamined. For the firms that haven’t started, the cost of that decision is already accumulating.
The cost hiding inside a healthy firm
Median profits per equity partner surged by 23% in 2025[1]. Fee income grew by 12%[2]. Fees per fee earner rose by 10%[3].
The financial metrics are pointing in the right direction and yet nearly 60% of legal professionals report poor mental wellbeing[4]. Associates are leaving the profession entirely at nearly twice the rate they were a year ago[5] and the partners responsible for retaining them often cannot explain why. This is what a cost looks like before anyone has decided to call it one. It sits beneath the revenue figures, beneath the utilisation reports, beneath the engagement survey results and invisible to every mechanism the firm uses to understand its own performance.
It does not arrive as a single line item. It accumulates in the associate who is present and billing but running on empty, in the matter that runs over because nobody flagged the problem early enough, in the write-off approved in thirty seconds because questioning it felt harder than absorbing it, in the resignation that arrives without warning from someone the firm could not afford to lose.
By the time any of this is visible in the numbers, the decisions that produced it were made months ago. In moments small enough that nobody logged them as a risk.
The firms that move first on this, that understand the connection between leadership self-awareness and human skills development before it becomes an obvious priority, will have a structural advantage that is genuinely difficult to replicate because acting on it requires a kind of honesty about leadership that many firms have not yet been willing to demand of themselves.
This is not a theoretical risk. It is a pattern that surfaces consistently in firms where the gap between leadership self-perception and team experience has never been properly examined.
The question is not whether this is happening in your firm but whether you would see it before your best people had already decided it wasn’t worth staying for.
The Leadership Blind Spot Brief is published weekly for senior leaders in UK law firms. If a colleague forwarded this, you can subscribe directly on LinkedIn and if it’s useful, pass it on to one person in your network who runs a firm.
Andre Thomas is the founder of Thomas Telman and the creator of TrustLytics®, a risk management system designed to help law firm leaders surface and close the blind spots affecting the firm’s performance and profitability. He works with professional services firms across the UK. You can find out more at thomastelman.com
[1] NatWest Legal Report 2025
[2] NatWest Legal Report 2025
[3] NatWest Legal Report 2025
[4] LawCare Life in the Law 2025 — 1,541 legal professionals surveyed between January and March 2025.
[5] BigHand 2025 — the jump from 9% to over 16% in a single year across 800+ law firm leaders in the UK and US.