One reason is that the UK's regulatory environment for
legal services has become very flexible (thanks largely to the separation of the SRA and the Law Society) and incentivises UK firms to be more open to alternative models than their US counterparts — as they, and their clients, know that
traditional legal services can be easily disintermediated by newlaw
competitors.
One of my core beliefs is that latent
legal services represents the future of the profession — lawyers will lose much of their
traditional work to technology, commoditization and new
competitors, but they'll gain much more through the innovative provision of proactive or constructive
services to currently unidentified and untapped client markets.