Stella Legal announced this week that it has formally united with its parent company Strategic Business Solutions (SBS) bringing together the legal tech capability of Stella Legal with the professional consulting and advisory capability of SBS.
The combined organisation will now operate solely as Stella Legal, offering transformation advisory, AI enablement, managed legal services, and enterprise data services in what the company describes as a single “performance intelligence” platform for in-house legal teams.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Stella Legal’s co-founder and CEO Tyson Ballard said the decision to combine the two businesses under one brand was driven by the speed in growth of Stella Legal (which has grown to 110 people in the space of 12 months) and the missed opportunities to not cross-pollinate. While Stella, which is headquartered in Arizona, has applied for an ABS license, Ballard said: “We’ve got top tier lawyers who have been doing this for 20 years and we’re now overlaying the AI knowledge to create an agentic law firm.” Ballard and the team are currently working on end-to-end agentic review work that will be at the centre of discussions at its Interstella summit in Lisbon in May.
The performance intelligence platform is an operating model designed to integrate how legal teams work, the technology they use, and the outside counsel they rely on, into a single measurable system. Rather than focusing on hours billed or tools deployed, Stella Legal says its model is optimised around outcomes such as reduced spend, faster cycle times and the ability for legal departments to scale without increasing headcount. The system spans six solution areas: AI enablement and adoption acceleration; managed services and contracting excellence; legal operations and operational excellence; M&A advisory and deal intelligence; discovery and dispute resolution; and enterprise data services. Notably, the enterprise data services layer – covering data hosting, migration, preservation and cybersecurity – is emerging as a major growth area.
One of the striking aspects of Stella Legal’s strategy is its explicit ambition to challenge elite law firms, including the magic circle. Ballard points out that traditional firms are structurally constrained by the billable hour and slow decision-making, at a time when clients are increasingly focused on outcomes and efficiency.
“I really feel like the next magic circles are probably going to get crowned in the next 12 to 24 months,” he says. “And I don’t think that they’re going to be the Freshfields and the Clifford Chances, because I really feel like they’re too slow to adapt to what’s changing in the market.” Not mincing his words, he adds: “I’m coming for their lunch.”
A key differentiator to the traditional model is pricing, and Ballard tells us: “We’re working with clients that haven’t really got the benefit of law firms using all these fantastic tools because their prices aren’t decreasing by much. It’s great for law firms to have a song and dance about what tools they are using but if it’s not benefiting the client at the end of the day, what’s the point?”
As in-house teams continue to scrutinise outside counsel spend and demand demonstrable value from AI investments, they will be watching developments such as these closely. The combination of tech + legal advice + different pricing structure is not new – you just have to look at the growth of the likes of Axiom and Elevate. Other AI native firms competing in this space include Eudia, and it’s interesting to note the number of law firms listed on a new AI Firm Index – you can find that here: https://aifirmindex.com/
BigLaw provides institutional excellence that has proved over the years to be hard to compete with. But the need for them to find ways to reinvent themselves has never been greater.
