Freedom in practice
by Yule Guttenbeil
Lex Nova Guild founder, Yule Guttenbeil, believes that lawyers don’t often think about what freedom means to them in their legal practice.
In this article, Yule discusses that freedom should include the freedom to work with who you choose.
Freedom in legal practice is not just the absence of constraint; it’s the presence of genuine choice: choice of partners, choice of projects, and choice of how value is created by whom, and shared across a matter’s lifecycle. In the traditional architecture of the profession, those choices are narrowed by limited structural options: either build a partnership, refer-out, or go it alone. The options are limited and administratively heavy in between.
The Lex Nova Guild is designed to reopen that field of choice; turning collaboration from an exception into a norm supported by infrastructure. So independent practitioners can elect the best teammate for the brief, under time pressure, and without sacrificing independence, client control, or professional standards.
The narrow freedom we’ve inherited
Legal practice has long rewarded scale through fixed firm structures, and punished flexibility through friction: referral-only pipelines, tight revenue mechanics driven by strict conflict management, and risk-averse admin that makes genuine teaming hard on short notice.
Sole practitioners, by design, enjoy autonomy but face structural limits on easily teaming-up. Beyond referrals or formal partnership, there are few practical, compliant, and timely avenues to co-deliver work with another practice under a shared commercial frame.
Even where commissions are permissible with disclosure, fees-for-referrals do not equal co-delivery; they route work, they don’t enable shared execution, and they’re ethically fraught. In some jurisdictions, they’re restricted outright, which further narrows options for value-aligned collaboration.
What real freedom should mean
If freedom is the ability to choose both partners and projects, then the profession needs operating models that make those choices safe, fast, and commercially coherent; not theoretical or administratively prohibitive. Real freedom means being able to bring the right expert into the room (e.g. employment for a corporate retainer this week, privacy next week) without getting caught up in the administrivia. Clear terms, clean conflict management, transparent economics, single-bill clarity, and preserved client relationships.
It also means competition law-aware information boundaries and role clarity, so rivals can collaborate as needed without eroding market independence or falling afoul of compliance obligations.
Why the referral binary fails
Referrals shift matters; they rarely share delivery, learning loops, or accountability, and they sever the through-line of client relationship management at precisely the moment background knowledge matters the most.
Formal partnerships create permanence where only a targeted, project-specific alliance may be needed, and they introduce cultural, brand, and governance entanglements that outlive the brief. The result is siloing: talented lawyers constrained by structures that make the simplest, best collaboration, two independent practices, one integrated matter plan, harder than it should be.
The Lex Nova response
The Lex Nova Guild exists to turn collaboration into a professional default by enabling strategic coopetition under a common framework that protects independence while enabling seamless matter-by-matter team-ups.
The model centres on three pillars: secure collaboration infrastructure (member directory and matter management tools), a financial clearing house (single invoice sent to the client by their usual lawyer via whatever means they normally would, automated distributions, transparent allocations), and professional standards (engagement protocols, performance benchmarks, relationship boundaries, dispute resolution).
Practically, this means a sole or boutique practice can engage a specialist through the Guild, maintain direct client ownership, agree up-front terms and roles, and work under time pressure without having to negotiate the terms from the ground up each time.
Freedom, operationalised
Here’s an example: On a Tuesday, a longstanding corporate client calls: there’s a sensitive restructuring; employment, safety, and privacy are in scope; timelines are brutal. Under the Guild framework, the lead practice selects the right employment specialist from the vetted network, locks engagement terms, conflicts, and data rooms in minutes, and proceeds with one plan, one bill, clear allocations, and intact client stewardship. The work feels like a single team because it is, without converting independence into permanence or sacrificing competitive position. Once the job is done, both lawyer’s continue practicing as they normally would.
Guardrails that make freedom durable
True flexibility requires some train-tracks: disclosure where benefits flow, boundaries around sensitive information, and alignment with the Legal Profession Uniform framework across participating jurisdictions. The Guild’s design bakes in these guardrails; confidentiality, competition safeguards, conflict management, and professional indemnity consciousness; so freedom is exercised within a stable, compliant chassis rather than being improvised on the clock.
A wider field of choice
Freedom in legal practice should feel like an expanding frontier: the ability to say yes to the right work, with the right people, at the right time, and to do so without diluting brand, culture, or client relationships. By making ad-hoc, high-trust collaboration administratively light and commercially clear, the Lex Nova Guild turns the profession’s binary into a spectrum, where independence and partnership are not endpoints but coordinates lawyers can move between as matters demand. That is the freedom worth building toward. Choice is restored, not just in principle, but in workflow, economics, and delivery, exactly where it should be.
