The kind of law firm we want to build
For years, the legal profession has moved steadily towards greater specialisation. The more senior the lawyer, the more narrowly defined their area of expertise often becomes. There is good reason for that. Complex questions call for deep expertise, and no one should pretend to know everything.
Clients, however, do not experience their business through neat legal categories. A single business issue often cuts across several areas of law, and it rarely makes sense to break it down according to the legal profession’s own internal boundaries. This is especially true in areas such as technology projects and M&A, where different legal questions quickly become intertwined.
That is why depth needs to be matched by the ability to see how different issues connect with one another and with the client’s business. Expertise in a single area of law will not, on its own, solve the whole problem. At Folks, we have been deliberately building around that idea.
The generalist may be making a comeback
Although professional work has long been moving towards ever greater specialisation, AI appears to be creating a parallel trend in the other direction. In its 2026 AI predictions, for example, PwC talks about the rise of the generalist. The idea is that as AI takes on more narrowly defined expert tasks, human roles may become broader.
Less value is tied to carrying out a narrowly defined task, and more to working across functions, exercising judgement and keeping sight of the outcome. PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer points in the same direction. Based on more than one billion job postings, the report finds that roles heavily exposed to AI increasingly call for judgement and leadership alongside technical skills, with even junior roles requiring capabilities traditionally associated with more experienced professionals.
The shift is easy to recognise in legal work. Research, first-pass analysis and drafting are becoming faster, while the importance of the lawyer’s own judgement increases. A lawyer’s value lies less and less in finding information, and more in putting that information into context and using it well.
What does a good generalist actually do?
Talking about generalists can sound like a return to a time when one corporate lawyer was expected to handle everything. That is not the idea. A modern generalist does not try to master every area of law personally; they understand business and law broadly enough to make sense of the whole situation.
A single client issue may cut across several areas of law. From the client’s perspective, however, these are not separate assignments but one problem that needs to be solved. A good generalist identifies what really matters, what can be dealt with quickly and where deeper specialist expertise is needed.
The Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession has highlighted the same point. Complex situations require the ability to bring several perspectives together, rather than simply ever narrower specialisation. General Counsel, in particular, operate at the intersection of law, business, risk and strategy. KPMG’s 2026 Global General Counsel Outlook reflects the same shift in practice. According to the report, 75% of General Counsel are regularly or continuously asked for views on matters that go beyond purely legal questions. Senior management also places a premium on the ability to balance risk against opportunity.
This way of working is familiar to us at Folks, because most of our lawyers have spent part of their careers in in-house legal teams. In-house, you cannot simply say that an issue falls outside your area and leave it there. You first need to understand what the real issue is, and then work out what should be done about it.
Knowing the client makes that judgement much better. When a lawyer understands the business model, the people, the way decisions are made and the organisation’s risk appetite, it becomes easier to judge the right level of legal input. A EUR 1,000 issue should not usually be handled with EUR 100,000 precision. That is what we mean when we talk about right-sized legal support and an in-house mindset.
Breadth only works if there is real depth behind it
A generalist model only works if it is backed by genuine specialist expertise. For us, expertise is not about titles and certificates on a website, but about having handled demanding issues repeatedly and in practice over a long period of time. Depth comes from experience, difficult situations and solving similar problems across different organisations.
We have, for example, built data protection programmes for some of Finland’s largest companies, but in practice that work reaches far beyond the GDPR. You need to understand how data moves through the organisation, how systems and supplier chains work, what the business is trying to achieve through technology and how digitally mature the organisation is. Legal expertise has to connect with an understanding of how the organisation actually works.
Media is a slightly different example. For us, it is first and foremost an industry, and years of working at its core have built deep expertise across several areas of law: from copyright to marketing, technology procurement to data protection, and competition law to freedom of expression. Working deeply within one industry also teaches you more than its sector-specific legal rules. You learn to see how different areas of law and business models connect in practice. The same underlying structures appear in different forms in other industries as well. Strong sector knowledge can therefore make a lawyer better even when the business environment changes.
Sometimes the issue becomes a project
A legal issue can also grow from a single question into a broader project. In larger projects, getting the individual legal answers right is no longer enough. Someone needs to see the whole picture, identify the critical points and keep the work moving together with the client organisation and other advisers.
Legal is no longer a separate workstream running alongside the project; it is part of the project itself. Alongside substantive legal expertise, this calls for project management skills and the ability to get the whole thing over the line. The lawyer’s role is not only to answer the legal questions, but to help make sure the project actually progresses.
We have advised on hundreds of M&A transactions and corporate restructurings. Transactions are often the most visible examples externally, but the same kind of project capability is needed when a company builds a new data protection or compliance model, restructures a key contract framework, carries out an outsourcing or rolls out new technology. Ideally, the client should not need to change advisers simply because an individual legal question has grown into a larger project.
Three layers, one way of working
The Folks model is built around three layers: a generalist who knows the client, specialist expertise where it is needed, and the ability to take responsibility for larger projects when an individual issue grows into something bigger. Sometimes a quick call is enough, sometimes you need a specialist, and sometimes the right answer is a full team. The point is that the way we work should flex with the client’s needs, without the client having to assemble a new group of advisers every time.
This is the kind of law firm we want to build at Folks. Not a generalist firm instead of a specialist firm, and not a collection of disconnected specialists, but a legal team where breadth, depth and project capability reinforce one another. The idea is ultimately simple: clients should get the right kind of legal support at the right scale.
Two new lawyers will be joining that set-up in November, by the way. More on them soon!
Anna Paimela
Partner
+358 40 1648626
