Read Part I

Platforma.Legal partners Dmitry Maltsev and Vlad Surkov spoke to Pravo.ru editor-in-chief Boris Boltyansky about their philosophy, the benefits of project teams for clients and, ultimately, the results of their unconventional strategy.

Boris Boltyansky: With a significantly better work-life balance?

Vlad Surkov: Yes.

Dmitry Maltsev: Just imagine how many people are looking wistfully into the distance right now.

Vlad Surkov: If our model has one major advantage, I think it is flexibility. As we have just said, if you want to work eighteen-hour days, go ahead: you will earn more. You will work very hard and have dark circles under your eyes, but you will earn more.

To be fair, and this is perhaps what you were asking, there will be no leap from a hundred roubles to a billion dollars. Unfortunately, we are not in a profession where that is possible. We provide a service, in the best sense of that word, and I see nothing demeaning about that for lawyers. Service providers do not make extraordinary fortunes.

Dmitry Maltsev: At least, not more than the people they serve.

Vlad Surkov: Exactly.

Boris Boltyansky: As the old joke goes, your lawyer can make you a millionaire, provided you were a billionaire to begin with.

Suppose you have presented the model very persuasively. Hundreds of thousands of lawyers watching are now holding their breath, wanting to enter this wonderful world where they work considerably less, earn almost as much and feel like independent professionals in control of their intellectual resources.

Dmitry Maltsev: Let us suppose so.

Boris Boltyansky: If we speak to firms specialising in corporate law and heads of those practices, we hear that the market is in a paradoxical situation. There is an enormous amount of work and many projects, because of foreign shareholders exiting and other economic developments, but very few available specialists. Almost everyone is recruiting and looking for these people. Teams and partners are being recruited from other firms. Taking this opportunity to address our viewers, what does the lawyer you would be willing to bring on board look like?

Dmitry Maltsev: That is a question with a qualification attached. We certainly seek professionals, and we speak to and work with professionals. As Vlad said, reputation and professional ability are our first requirements. But, returning to the original Uber question, those hundreds of thousands of lawyers dreaming of joining us tomorrow and becoming millionaires will not all be able to do so. Unlike mass production, mass consumption or Uber, we are emphatically not a mass-market product. We provide bespoke work for clients. Every lawyer is a carefully selected specialist. You cannot simply send in a form or register, as with Uber, and start working immediately. We have never aimed to create that.

Boris Boltyansky: What level does a lawyer need to reach? Must they at least be a partner at—?

Vlad Surkov: No. Generally, the person must already have substantial experience in the area needed for the particular project. For young lawyers watching, unfortunately, we are probably not the right option yet. Every project needs people who can deliver a finished product here and now. Professional experience matters, but we are not counting five, seven or ten years, and a particular job title or level reached elsewhere is not especially important to us.

Dmitry Maltsev: We have no formal requirements of that kind.

Vlad Surkov: It does not concern us. Frankly, and almost emphatically, it has never concerned me. In 27 years in the profession, I have seen many unprofessional people with impressive diplomas, and many excellent lawyers whose qualifications looked rather ordinary on paper. Previous employers are not a conclusive indicator either. Of course, ten years at a traditional law firm on a CV creates a certain instinctive confidence for someone with that background. But, in keeping with our flexible approach, we have found several outstanding people and professionals who had none of those impressive entries on their CVs.

This is not really a feature of our business model. It is about being willing to take a broad view of people and the market. The most conventional firm employing lawyers could do the same.

Dmitry Maltsev: It is a question of philosophy, I would say.

Vlad Surkov: It is an open-minded approach to people. There is an enormous amount of snobbery in our profession: if you do not have this, that and the other, we will not even consider you. I remember being a young lawyer and wanting to abandon the profession after an interview at a very prestigious American law firm. I was then starting out at what was still a Big Six, now Big Four, firm. They told me: “We would never hire someone like you. We only invited you to see what sort of creatures work at that firm.”

I began my career and spent my first eight years at what is usually called an audit firm. For many years, lawyers from those firms were not taken seriously. I was one of them. Later I became a partner in conventional law firms, and so on.

Boris Boltyansky: Yet that is considered one of the best possible professional training grounds, both for lawyers and auditors.

Vlad Surkov: Absolutely. In organising business processes, law firms objectively lag a long way behind the Big Four. Reputation and pedigree nevertheless weigh heavily on our profession. Another philosophical aim of our platform is to have a little less snobbery and a little less fixation on money. That does not mean we do not want to earn. Everyone wants a good life, and money is unavoidable. But we too often see the attitude: “Unless there is a lot of money involved, I will not even talk to you.”

We favour a slightly simpler, more flexible approach. Your CV and educational background are not the central issue. What matters is your professional ability to think.

Dmitry Maltsev: I would add motivation and responsibility. Each lawyer working with us is, in effect, an independent professional unit. They must be ready to take responsibility for the project. They feel that responsibility because it is their project too.

Boris Boltyansky: How do you identify responsibility and the ability to think? What is the entry process? An interview?

Dmitry Maltsev: An interview. We certainly speak to everyone who approaches us, sometimes at length and more than once. But in practice, correct me if I am wrong, nobody has simply come in from outside and started working with us. Everyone is either someone we have worked with before and know personally, or someone recommended by a person in our immediate professional circle: “This lawyer is a star. I have worked with them for ten years. Take them on.”

Vlad Surkov: To put some figures on that, around forty lawyers have worked with Platforma.Legal in its four years of existence. It is a small circle, within easy reach. We know all these people personally. As Dmitry said, we either knew them directly or they came through recommendations. That is another difference from Uber, where you fill in a form, appear to meet the requirements and start. The nature of our profession alone means we cannot simply recruit from advertisements.

Boris Boltyansky: I have to ask: of those forty lawyers, what proportion found a successful place on the platform, and how often was the conclusion, “That was interesting, but we will not continue working together”?

Dmitry Maltsev: I was about to challenge the phrase “have worked with us.”

Vlad Surkov: I know what you mean.

Dmitry Maltsev: They have not so much passed through as joined us. Of the roughly forty lawyers working with us, there has probably been only one case where we did not want to continue the relationship. Essentially, everyone who joined has stayed. We continue working with all of them in one way or another.

Boris Boltyansky: I conclude that Platforma.Legal is a wonderful firm. Even the photocopying is done by highly motivated, independent-minded lawyers.

Dmitry Maltsev: That is why they join us.

Boris Boltyansky: More seriously, what back-office support do you provide to make their work comfortable?

Dmitry Maltsev: A conventional range of support, from marketing articles and similar work to the standard resources needed for legal practice.

Vlad Surkov: To be specific, all the IT support is there. We have IT specialists who set everything up and connect people to our server. If a document has not saved or another everyday problem arises, we help with it from start to finish.

Dmitry Maltsev: There is an important point here. There is no disconnect between selling the service and doing the work. We do not sell a project and then simply collect the money at the end. We manage and monitor every project, as proper legal work requires. The partner who sold the service is the partner who leads the project.

Vlad Surkov: On back-office support, let me give an example. I have a closing after this interview. The data room needs to be copied to a disc. There is a dedicated person to do that, and it is not the lawyer leading the transaction. If we need a large volume of documents printed, we find an external provider.

Here is another example. I once worked at a very large and respected English law firm. At one point, that thoroughly traditional major firm made a business decision to transfer all its administrative staff out of the law firm’s employment. They continued working under service agreements between two companies.

We do not claim to be radically innovative. To be honest with ourselves and the public, we have invented nothing fundamentally new. We have borrowed ideas from different clever people who used them before us and adapted them a little.

Boris Boltyansky: Brought together best practices.

Vlad Surkov: We hope they are the best ones.

Dmitry Maltsev: This did not arise out of nowhere. We had examples in London and the United States. They were not identical models, but similar approaches, and we could see that they worked in practice. This is not a one-man show or a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. It is an approach that has appeared in the legal market and proved workable.

Boris Boltyansky: We have talked a great deal about the model’s appeal to lawyers. That is understandable: the lawyer is our protagonist at Pravo.ru. But which clients, in your view, are most comfortable working within your model?

Dmitry Maltsev: Although the overwhelming majority of our clients over the platform’s four years are new clients we gained after founding it, experience shows that they are the same type of clients, in scale and sector, that worked with us at international and large Russian law firms. We serve the same market. The level of clients and projects is the same.

Vlad Surkov: I would not disagree, but would add a qualification. Some large corporations attach great importance to the badge and, to continue the automotive analogy, the accompanying bodywork.

Dmitry Maltsev: We have encountered situations where it is a tick-box exercise. Heads of legal departments who know us well, and with whom we have long-standing relationships, have said: “We want to work with you, but our policy does not allow it.”

Boris Boltyansky: The panel requirements say the office must be at least 1,500 square metres?

Vlad Surkov: Something like that, yes.

Dmitry Maltsev: They say: “We know we want to do this project with you, but unfortunately we cannot, for formal reasons.”

Vlad Surkov: There are quite a few such cases. We understand and accept that. To be fair, we will not chase those clients, because doing so would destroy our business model. I realise I keep seeming to contradict myself about whether we are a traditional law firm or a different business. We sit somewhere between the two. Even so, if we met requirements such as a 1,500-square-metre office, no sensible business owner would rent that expensive space without filling it with people. That means employees and costs, and our whole business idea and financial model would cease to make sense.

Dmitry Maltsev: In fairness, the market and its scale today mean that many heads of legal, CEOs, CFOs and project leaders understand that quality is what matters in legal work. Those unable to engage a firm for purely formal reasons are still a minority.

Boris Boltyansky: I agree. Sometimes I think law firm marketing, names and brands exist largely in lawyers’ own minds. Clients often buy from, and make their choices around, an individual.

Dmitry Maltsev: Yes. Some clients whom we value very highly, and who know the legal market extremely well from many years of experience, have asked: “I want to do this project with you. Tell me exactly which lawyers will work on it. Will there be two or three? What is their track record? Who are they?” They examine it in that much detail.

Boris Boltyansky: Are those the best clients?

Dmitry Maltsev: They are demanding, but they understand very well why they are engaging you and what they will receive. Ultimately, that makes the professional relationship easier.

Boris Boltyansky: Let us return to you as entrepreneurs for the final question. I know you participate in legal rankings, certainly Pravo-300, so you inevitably compare yourselves with other firms. Looking at your development since you began, have you found evidence that your chosen model has helped you grow faster or made you happier? Or do you look at the rankings and say to each other: “If we had built a conventional firm, we would have been in Forbes long ago”?

Dmitry Maltsev: I would start at the end, at least for myself. Has it made us happier? Absolutely. We love what we do. A couple of years ago, we did have doubts. We sat opposite each other, looking miserable, and said that if this was how we were going to do it, perhaps we should not do it at all. It was not working as it should; something had to change. Ultimately, though, we are doing what we set out to do. We enjoy it enormously, and it works.

As for comparisons with other firms, I like telling this story. When we started planning the business in 2019, one of the principal weaknesses and risks in our SWOT analysis was precisely our alternative approach: no office and a distributed team. At the time, everyone still worked from conventional offices. Several clients told us: “It seems strange. You have no single place where you are based. You are spread out. What is this?” Then, just as we launched at the beginning of 2020, Covid arrived. It demonstrated not only that our idea was viable, but that for a period it was the only possible way of working. That was a bullseye.

The second bullseye came when international law firms left in 2022.

Vlad Surkov: As we began joking, by then we were already two years old.

Dmitry Maltsev: We were no longer a start-up.

Vlad Surkov: We were already a law firm with a history, a brand with a history.

Dmitry Maltsev: That departure stirred up the legal market substantially, both for clients and lawyers. Clients began to look differently at the legal function. It showed that we were not merely viable but quite successful. Lawyers and clients were happy to work with us. Today, not a single client asks why we have no office. Not one.

Vlad Surkov: In some ways that is both good and bad. Several clients have told me: “Broadly speaking, you are just like the others.” We talk a great deal about our differences and advantages, but clients do not always think about them. Many have their own problems and no time to consider a law firm’s business model. They care about quality, timing and price. They see that we deliver all three. What difference does it make whether you have an office, how many lawyers are on staff or whether they are all employees?

Returning to your question about happiness and why we do this, I spent more than twenty years in the conventional model. I became very accustomed to receiving a good salary twice a month, and, as a partner, a substantial quarterly profit distribution too. It was pleasant and comfortable. But, strangely, precisely when my earnings peaked, I lost my motivation. I spent a long time trying to recover it and even left the profession for a short while. Then I realised I had to return. I now have less stability, and my cash flow is much less comfortable. Before, you received your money at the start of the month, allocated it and lived accordingly. Now you know roughly what you need, but it is not always available at exactly the right moment.

The first thing I understand is that my earnings depend entirely on my ability and willingness to be active. If I am active and engaged, I will find work. After four years at the firm, I have a deep conviction that things will be all right. Some people may be pleasantly, or perhaps unpleasantly, surprised that very substantial companies come to us knowing exactly who they are dealing with. It does not put them off. We can convince serious businesspeople that we can do good work.

The second point is that, having been a partner in law firms, I have had considerable experience of administering these processes at a senior level, including budgeting. I value my freedom, even though it comes with a degree of instability. That freedom is worth a great deal.

This brings me back to the earlier point: law is an independent profession. Broadly speaking, how much you earn and how much you work, in effort and hours, depends on you. There are times when I do not want to work. Then do not work. Sometimes I do not. There is less money, but that is all right. In that sense, I think it is rather wonderful.

Boris Boltyansky: I hardly dared interrupt. I wondered whether you were about to declare that lawyers are born to be free: a slogan for lawyers in private practice and in-house alike.

Vlad, Dmitry, thank you very much for the interview.

Vlad Surkov: Thank you very much.

Boris Boltyansky: I have a great affection for the legal profession, largely because it is work for independent-minded intellectuals. I entirely agree with that.

This has been an interesting and engaging conversation. I wish Platforma.Legal every success on what I hope will be a very long journey.

Vlad Surkov: Thank you very much.

Dmitry Maltsev: Thank you.

Watch the interview with Dmitry Maltsev and Vlad Surkov (in Russian).