Revolut just told its law firms their seats aren’t safe.

Tom Hambrett, chief legal officer of the US$75bn fintech, announced last week that Revolut is ditching its traditional law firm panel in favour of a performance-based model called Revolut Partners. Firms are assessed quarterly against hard metrics. Underperform, and they’re out.

“No one partner’s position in the starting lineup is guaranteed,” Hambrett wrote in a LinkedIn post that lit up the legal community. “Firms can no longer solely rely on soft relationship touch points to keep their place in the squad… performance wins you minutes on the pitch.”

It is the most public signal yet that the static panel model, long the default for large legal buyers, is cracking.

Yes, most definitely.

In Australia, the model is deeply entrenched. The Federal Government’s Whole of Australian Government panel is mandatory for all non-corporate Commonwealth entities. NSW runs 53 law firms across seven sub-panels. Large listed corporates use them too. For example, Coles’ public reporting confirms its legal team operates with a pre-agreed panel of external firms.

The problem is that the traditional version — static rosters renewed every few years on the strength of relationships — increasingly doesn’t work. A 2018 study by the GC Thought Leaders Experiment analysed more than 1,400 legal matters across 28 large companies and found panel firms did not outperform non-panel firms on any key criteria, including cost, quality, responsiveness and solutions focus. Clients with panels saw no meaningful difference in outside counsel performance compared to those without panels at all.

Some push back on that framing. One UK-based consultant argued the real value of external advisers lies in their nuanced understanding of a client’s business, “and that is only attainable through close and enduring collaboration.”

Clients aren’t abandoning panels. They’re rebuilding them, and AI is accelerating that shift.

Thomson Reuters’ 2025 Legal Department Operations Index found that legal departments in the US are actively shifting away from formal static panels toward informal preferred-firm lists or selecting firms on a matter-by-matter basis. CLOC’s 2025 State of the Industry report adds that 38% of legal departments globally are now running structured annual performance evaluations of outside counsel, and another 17% planning to implement them.

Part of what is driving that scrutiny is AI. Firms are adopting it fast, but the economics aren’t flowing back to clients. Billing rates rose 9.6% last year, more than double inflation. Axiom’s research shows 79% of firms are already using AI, but only 6% pass the savings to clients, and 34% are actively charging premium rates for AI-enhanced work.

Hambrett’s argument is that AI has already changed what clients should be paying for. External counsel once spent 80% of their time on research and precedent gathering and 20% on actual advice. AI has flipped that ratio. The freed-up capacity should mean sharper strategy, better judgment and higher-quality output.

For Revolut, that’s the new baseline.

“That investment in AI, in talent, in capability needs to show up in the work. Not just in the pitch. Show us the 80% you got back. Use it for advice, strategy, judgment and the work that actually moves us forward,” said Hambrett

The panel isn’t dead. It just stopped being a safe seat. Whether Revolut’s model becomes the new default is the question top firms will now be forced to answer.