The EU AI Act’s transparency and general-purpose AI obligations arrived on 2 August 2026, and organisations across Europe are being reminded, sometimes uncomfortably, that policy claims and demonstrable compliance are different things. Earlier this summer, 360 Business Law, one of the two arms of the 360 Law Group, launched an AI Audit service to help enterprises close the distance between the two. It was the kind of product launch that deserved a short write-up, and would ordinarily have received one.
However, what emerged during a conversation with Robert Taylor, the group’s chief executive and general counsel, was something considerably richer.
The AI Audit is really interesting, and worth returning to. But it is one relatively small piece of a group that has, over the last twelve or so years, been rebuilding what a law firm can look like when it is allowed to break most of the profession’s default assumptions at once.
360 Law Group is two firms operating in parallel. 360 Business Law is an unregulated law firm serving over four hundred corporate clients across around ninety countries, drawing on a network of between six hundred and seven hundred lawyers. 360 Law Services is an England & Wales regulated law firm handling private client work, personal injury, family law, litigation, residential and commercial property, as well as wills and probate. The two exist under one holding entity because Robert wants both available in the same conversation. Often what happens is that a firm that can address only the corporate side ends up sending clients elsewhere for the personal issues that inevitably arise.
This week, The Legal Wire sat down with Robert, who spent his earlier career as a barrister and then in-house, ending as general counsel, international, for a NASDAQ-listed software and gaming company. He started 360 Law Group when he decided the legal profession had stopped meeting the needs of the clients it was designed to serve. The pricing model is unusual. The structure of the network is unusual. The AI product, previewed lightly in this piece with his permission, is unusual too. The through-line is a founder who thinks the profession’s incentives have been arranged for the wrong party for a long time.
A pricing model built for the client, not the firm
The most distinctive thing about 360 Business Law is how it charges. Along with country fixed low hourly rates, 360 Business Law ‘s flagship offering for companies is a fixed-fee subscription, agreed at the start of a twelve-month engagement, that does not fluctuate with the volume of work carried out inside that period. If the client’s needs increase, the fee stays where it started. In fifteen years of operating, Robert says he can count on one hand the number of times a fee has been renegotiated mid-cycle, and only where the client’s scope changed materially.
The pricing sits alongside two other unusual choices. There are no billable hours anywhere in the business. Lawyers in the group are paid a share of the fee generated for each matter, which Robert argues aligns their incentives with the client’s rather than the firm’s. And there are no charges for time spent on non-substantive interactions, the emails and phone calls that a traditional firm meters in six-minute increments and that clients experience as a running tax on asking questions.
Robert’s account of why the model works commercially is not sentimental. Some months a client sends very little work and margin is high; other months a client sends more than usual and the firm carries the cost. Across a twelve-month cycle it evens out, particularly at the scale the group operates at, and the client relationship is more valuable to the firm than the peaks and troughs are.
The harder problem for the traditional model, as Robert points out, is behavioural. Clients on a metered relationship are trained to ration their engagement with their lawyers, and wait until a matter is urgent, and often expensive, before picking up the phone. Clients on a fixed-fee relationship contact their lawyers earlier and more freely, which produces better communication and legal outcomes.
The economic argument for the billable hour, in his view, has gradually been outrun by the behavioural argument against it.
TLW: You’ve built the entire firm around the idea that the billable hour damages the client relationship more than it protects the firm’s economics. What is the strongest argument you have heard from the other side, and what would it actually take for a traditional firm to move away from the model you left behind?
Robert: “The strongest argument, and I have a lot of sympathy with it, is that the billable hour is the most honest way to deal with uncertainty. A fixed fee doesn’t remove risk, it moves it onto the firm. The firm must price their fees carefully, so the client whose matter runs smoothly may end up subsidising another client that doesn’t. Recorded time also gives you a defensible measure of effort when costs are being assessed between parties. That’s a real point, made by people who care about their clients as much as I do.
What it would take isn’t really a pricing decision. It’s three harder things: several years of clean matter-level cost data, so you’re pricing rather than guessing; breaking the link between the hours a partner records and what a partner earns; and letting go of leverage, because the pyramid only pays if junior time is sold at a multiple.
That last one is the difficulty, and I don’t think it’s stubbornness. It asks a partnership to reopen the question of who owns the profit and that’s a hard conversation to have with people you’ve built a firm alongside.”
Two firms, one holding company, and what a real GC truly requires
The structural choice underneath 360 Law Group traces directly to Robert’s previous role. As international general counsel for a NASDAQ-listed software company, he was responsible not only for corporate work but for supporting colleagues whose lives had spilled into the office in ways a corporate law firm could not easily accommodate.
- The employee whose son had a driving-under-influence charge in another state.
- The senior manager going through a divorce.
- The colleague dealing with a probate matter overseas.
Robert’s argument is that these are not tangential to the general counsel’s job; they are the job, at any company small enough that a single lawyer is expected to be legally useful across the whole business. A GC without access to private-client capability sends her people out of the building, at which point they are back on the open market, hunting for someone competent and reasonably priced in a jurisdiction they may not know.
The 360 Law Group’s two arms exist to solve precisely that problem.
360 Business Law is unregulated and handles the corporate side. That structure allows it to serve business clients at a materially lower cost, and to operate in jurisdictions a regulated practice could not otherwise reach. It also means a large corporate enterprise working across several countries can instruct and be invoiced through a single central office, rather than assembling a panel of local firms.
360 Law Services is regulated in England and Wales and carries professional indemnity insurance, which allows it to take on private client matters.
In practice the two overlap usefully. Their international lawyers within 360 Business Law can, in most cases, handle private client work alongside business law, so when a general counsel comes to them, they can offer solutions for the company and for its people.
It is not the way the profession is structured, but Robert’s view is that the way the profession is structured has not caught up with the way businesses run in reality.
The scale that makes this possible is the network itself. All lawyers hold a minimum of five years PQE, with the group average between twelve and fifteen years. Robert is direct about what the floor is for. His own clients, when commissioning outside counsel from major firms, were being staffed with associates whose PQE was low relative to the fees charged, which reflected the traditional firm’s economics rather than the client’s interests. He set the floor deliberately.
TLW: You’ve said the personal legal issues your colleagues brought to your desk when you were a GC were part of the job, not a distraction from it. Why does the traditional legal profession still treat that side of the work as beneath serious firms and what is the client losing out on when their lawyer cannot help them across that whole surface?
Robert: “When I was a GC, the man who ran our warehouse stopped me on a Tuesday afternoon to ask about his mother’s will. That wasn’t an interruption. He’d trusted me with something that mattered more to him than anything else on my desk that week.
I don’t think the profession looks down on that work out of snobbery. It’s structural. Firms are built around practice areas and rate cards, and a conversation about a will, or a difficult divorce, doesn’t fit tidily into either. It’s small, it’s unpredictable, and it never shows up in a league table. So it becomes someone else’s problem, and the client is politely sent elsewhere.
What gets lost is the thing that makes a lawyer useful in the first place. Trust doesn’t compartmentalise. The relationship that lets you tell a board something it doesn’t want to hear is built on exactly those unglamorous moments. And for a general counsel, being able to say “yes, we can help” to a colleague in the worst week of their life is worth more inside a business than most of the advice they’ll commission all year.”
The AI Audit, and the difference between claiming compliance and demonstrating it
The AI Audit was the reason this conversation began. Robert’s team launched the service in June, ahead of the EU AI Act’s August 2026 implementation deadline for general-purpose AI obligations, and it addresses a specific problem the AI Act has created for large enterprises.
The problem, as Robert describes it, is that most organisations do not have a clear picture of how AI is being used inside their own walls. Marketing teams run generative tools their compliance functions have never mapped. Engineers deploy LLM APIs against internal data whose retention terms nobody has reviewed. HR is trialling AI-driven screening. Under the AI Act, the risk classification of these systems, and the governance obligations that follow, depend on facts the organisation often cannot readily produce.
The Audit is designed to close that gap. Robert’s team runs a structured discovery across the organisation, produces an inventory of AI systems in use, maps them against the AI Act’s risk categories, and delivers a report documenting both the current state and the actions required to move a claim of compliance into something the organisation could demonstrate to a regulator.
Robert’s framing of the wider point is that the AI Audit is a symptom of a bigger shift in how regulation is going to work over the next five years. Regulators are moving away from asking whether organisations have policies and toward asking whether they can prove those policies are being followed. Demonstrable compliance is a different discipline from procedural compliance, and most enterprises are not yet organised for it.
TLW: The AI Act has forced businesses to move from claiming compliance to being able to demonstrate it. In your view, which industries are furthest ahead on that shift, which are furthest behind, and where are you seeing organisations get caught out in ways they did not see coming?
Robert: “Financial services and medical devices are furthest ahead, and not because they’re more virtuous, they already had a model for risk governance and conformity assessment, so this is an extension of something familiar rather than a new discipline. The furthest behind, in my experience, are solid mid-market businesses that have never thought of themselves as technology companies. Recruitment and HR is where I’d look first.
Where people get caught out is more human than legal and usually comes down to two things. The first is assuming the obligation sits with whoever built the tool. If you fine-tune it, rebrand it, or use it in a way the developer never intended, a good deal of it lands on you. The second is simply not knowing what you have. Marketing bought something on a company card, HR is trialling a sifting tool, and nobody wrote it down. You can’t demonstrate compliance across an estate you haven’t mapped.
And I’d gently say the deferral of the high-risk deadlines isn’t the reprieve people are treating it as. The law has moved; customers haven’t. Evidence requests arrive through procurement questionnaires and contract schedules long before any regulator asks.”
The AI platform, previewed
Robert used the interview to preview, on background, an internal AI project his team has been building. He asked that it be treated as a light preview ahead of a full launch, which the group is planning for mid-August. What is described here is at his invitation.
The tool is a contract lifecycle management platform, aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises and larger organisations, that handles agreements from creation through to completion and archiving. Several clients are already piloting it and will transition to the full platform on launch.
What makes it particularly interesting is the commercial and operational choice that forms the basis of it. Rather than charging a substantial subscription fee, in the register of Harvey or Legora, the platform is priced on a low-cost, per-contract-review basis. And rather than positioning itself as an AI-only offering, it is fully integrated with the group’s network of specialist lawyers. After an AI review, the client can escalate directly to a specialist in the relevant jurisdiction or route the matter back to their own in-house team. The design assumption is that AI handles the volume, humans handle the judgement, and the client does not have to choose between them at a moment’s notice.
The wider point is also worth mention. Much of the legal AI market is priced on the assumption of a Big Law customer with a Big Law budget. SMEs and mid-market businesses, which represent most of the commercial legal need in most economies, cannot access those tools on those terms. 360’s pricing model is a deliberate answer to that.
TLW: Most legal AI on the market today has been priced for Big Law. Your platform is deliberately priced for the mid-market and SMEs. What have you learned about what businesses at that end of the market need from AI, that the current generation of tools is missing?
Robert: “The mistake is to sell the mid-market a smaller version of an enterprise product. Our enterprise clients do need the full contract lifecycle — a single repository, approval routing, obligations and renewal dates tracked across thousands of agreements. That is real value to a business with a legal team and a procurement function. To a company of say forty people, it’s an operating system they will never switch on. So SMEs get contract review on its own: the moment that actually matters to them, which is the agreement sitting in front of them today.
What nobody seems to price for is the part that can’t be automated. An enterprise client has in-house counsel to sanity-check whatever the AI produces. An SME has nobody. Handing that business a confident answer and no one to ask isn’t a service, it’s a risk transfer.
So every client, at both ends, has access to our global legal team. The software tells you which clauses matter; a lawyer tells you whether to sign. Enterprises use that occasionally, smaller businesses lean on it heavily, and that’s fine — it’s the same team.
The industry has been selling tools to people who have no one to ask. That’s the gap.”
360 Law Group in the bigger picture
There is a pattern to the choices Robert has made across the group. The pricing refuses the billable hour: 360 Business Law works to a low fixed hourly rate set for each country, so clients know what they are paying before the work begins, and offers a subscription service that gives a business continuous access to a lawyer for a predictable monthly fee. The structure puts regulated and unregulated services under one roof. The lawyer network is deliberately senior. The AI product is priced for a market the profession has been content to leave underserved.
None of these are individually unprecedented, but together they describe a firm whose founding premise is that most of the profession’s operating assumptions are the wrong ones.
In this regard, Robert is candid that some of what he has built works because he came in from the client side and had no legal-establishment orthodoxy to defend. He is equally candid that some of what he has built has been possible because the group is privately held and does not have to answer, quarterly, to partners whose profit expectations were set by the model he is replacing.
Whether the model scales further is an interesting question. The AI platform is a bet that the group’s approach can extend into technology in a way that reaches clients the traditional firm structure never would. The AI Audit is a bet that the same discipline of demonstrable compliance can be productised for a market only just discovering it needs the service. Both are early. But they sit inside a firm that has already, over fifteen years, made a fixed-fee, no-billable-hours, mixed-regulated-and-unregulated legal services business work profitably at real scale. The rest of the profession has mostly declined to attempt it.
