Leon Johnson, most recently a partner at Goodwin in San Francisco and previously a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, is joining Omnilex, an AI-native law firm out of Zurich. He will be Managing Partner there and lead its US business – see AL Interview below where he explains why he’s gone all-in with the new model philosophy.

At Kirkland he helped build the Salt Lake City office to more than 100 lawyers and handled transactional work at Goodwin. However, he told Artificial Lawyer he just no longer believes the traditional Big Law pyramid model has a long-term future. Instead, Johnson said he wants to help develop a new approach, with the ‘new model’ as AL calls it, as the guiding blueprint for what he wants to build in America – and perhaps in the future in other markets, such as the UK.

Plus, it’s definitely worth mentioning that the late, great Clayton Christensen, who wrote the seminal work ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’, was a mentor of Johnson’s. He told this site that those theories have informed his view of the current legal market and how it must change. And AL would totally concur that Christensen’s views connect very nicely to the legal market – in fact, this site has written a couple of pieces in the past about this. I.e. Big Law is itself an innovation and was ‘created’, ‘innovated’ into existence in the 1970s and 1980s. It has been an incredible invention and has been very, very successful. But, as with all innovations – it eventually hits Christensen’s dilemma.…

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