What We Heard at the SCG Legal 2026 Annual Meeting
Ajax was one of four Vetted Solution Partners at SCG Legal's 2026 Annual Meeting, held in Washington in September, and we're still working through what we heard there. SCG is a network of 125 independent firms across over 20 countries, and they told us this was the largest annual meeting they've run, with 219 people in the room, so four days turned out to be nowhere near enough of them.
Thank you to Katherine Silverman and the team at Berman Fink Van Horn, and to the team at Boutin Jones, for bringing us into this network in the first place - we wouldn't have been in that room without them. Thanks as well to Alina Gorokhovsky and Erin Kane, who put the whole thing on; four days that run that smoothly are usually somebody's year of work.
What a Vetted Solution Partner is, and why there are only four
SCG keeps the partner list short deliberately. There were four of us at this meeting: Legora, Ajax, Spoken with Authority and TransPerfect. Alina explained the thinking from the stage better than we could have, which is that members don't want a room full of sponsors, and that the ones who are there are tools the member firms already use, since that's how they get selected in the first place.
That second half is the part we care about. We're the only timekeeping product on the list, and we're there because firms inside the network were already running Ajax and were willing to say so, which is a harder thing to earn than a sponsorship slot and a much better reason to be in the room.
The panel
Our co-founder Jack Weinberger sat on the session about the math of law firm revenue and practice management, covering AI, billing best practices, pricing strategy, outsourcing and fee innovation. Katherine Silverman of Berman Fink Van Horn moderated, and the other two panelists were Martin Dell of RosholmDell in Sweden and Matt Felten of TransPerfect Legal, both of whom were better on pricing than we were.
Katherine set the tone beforehand by asking for real numbers rather than opinions about AI, which made it a considerably better hour than it would otherwise have been. If you want a panel to be useful, that request seems to be most of the work.
If billable hours go away, how do you price the work?
Alina said from the stage that with AI, we're no longer selling hours, we're now selling value. It's an easy thing to nod along to and a hard thing to actually run a firm on, and almost every conversation we had over three days turned out to be some version of the same question: if the hour isn't the unit any more, how do you price a matter before you know how long it's going to take?
Several people had partial answers that were better than anything we'd have come up with, though nobody we spoke to had a complete one. The approaches we heard most often were pricing from historical data on similar matters, which only works if your time data is good enough to trust, and pricing in phases so the estimate gets revisited at each stage rather than once at the start.
Both of those depend on the same thing, which is knowing what the work actually took. A firm that can't tell you how many hours a given kind of matter really consumed can't price it as a fixed fee without guessing, and the guess usually comes out of the partner's margin. That's less of an AI problem than a record-keeping one.
Associates writing their own time down
The other conversation we keep coming back to was much less abstract. A firm administrator told us that her associates routinely write their own time down, recording less than they actually worked, because a second year genuinely doesn't know whether four hours on a memo is normal or embarrassing. So they guess low and hope nobody asks.
That time never reaches a realization report, and as far as the firm is concerned it never happened. You can't manage it, you can't price against it, and you'll never see it in a write-off number, because it was gone before it was ever recorded. It's a hard problem to fix with a policy, since the associate isn't being careless; they're being anxious, and asking them to be braver about their own timesheets isn't much of a plan.
This is one of the places passive capture genuinely helps, and we'd rather be honest about the reason: when the draft entry already says four hours because that's what the work took, the conversation shifts from what the associate is willing to claim to what the firm thinks the work was worth. Those are different arguments, and the second one is much easier to have.
Thank you
It was genuinely fun to talk with everybody, and we're grateful SCG chose us for this year's partner group. Jack and Dillon Lemire are still working through their follow-ups, so if we ran out of time on your question in Washington, get in touch and we'll pick it up where we left off.
If you're at an SCG member firm and you'd like to see what your own week looks like as finished time entries, you can book a demo and mention SCG.
