The 2026 UK Legal Market: Where Growth is, and What it Takes to Win it

Adam Kerr is the founder of Primas and its Managing Partner. In that role, Adam concerns himself with the firm’s strategic direction, development and operational performance. In addition, Adam’s legal work centres around solving clients’ commercial problems. These solutions can take the form of legal proceedings or the drafting of commercial documents. In particular, Adam specialises in complex corporate transactions; corporate finance work; commercial contracts; and sophisticated IT contracts and arrangements. Primas Law is a niche commercial firm with offices in Manchester, Cheshire, Liverpool and London. The firm specialises in corporate and commercial, commercial property, commercial litigation and insolvency.

Lucy Leach is Director of Research Strategy at the Thomson Reuters Institute (TRI), where she oversees the design and analysis of TRI’s primary research programmes across the legal, tax and corporate sectors. With over 20 years of experience studying professional services markets, her work focuses on translating large-scale survey and interview research into strategic insight for senior leaders — covering client behaviour, competitive dynamics, firm performance and the forces reshaping how professional services are bought and sold. She leads design of the Institute’s Market Insights programme, the most comprehensive ongoing study of global legal buyer sentiment and behaviour, and is the principal researcher behind TRI’s annual State of the UK Legal Market report.

Dale Hodgkinson is an accomplished Technology Consultant and the former Head of Strategy and Architecture at Slaughter and May. With over 25 years of legal tech expertise, Dale specializes in driving business-outcome enterprise architecture, managing high-performing business analyst teams, and designing forward-thinking technology capability roadmaps—including the successful delivery of a comprehensive 9-year strategic roadmap.

A recognised thought leader, Dale has been featured in The Lawyer for his work in optimising transactional efficiency. He holds an MBA in Technology Management, where his research focused on virtual law firms, and he plans to pursue a PhD exploring the evolution of virtual law firms within the Metaverse. Outside of his professional life, Dale is a proud father of five young adults, a Kung Fu practitioner, and an avid fan of music and cinema.

Sam is responsible for driving the firm’s innovation strategy and for creating a culture which encourages ideas and facilitates their implementation. He leads the firm’s Innovation & Legal Technology Team and chairs both its UK AI steering group and its Transatlantic Technology Group. Under his leadership, the firm has been shortlisted in the Financial Times Innovative Lawyer Awards for its strategic approach to innovation and for its innovation in Generative AI Tools. Recently, Womble Bond Dickinson became the first UK firm to sign up to deploy Thomson Reuters’ CoCounsel to all of its lawyers.