City law firm Pinsent Masons is set to slash jobs in its alternative legal resourcing unit as it plans to overhaul the platform.
The unit, Vario, was set up in 2013 and employs full-time staff and a network of freelancers. The firm created it as a separate business to provide flexible staffing and legal services where needed, including for in-house clients. Vario lists on its LinkedIn page that it employs between 1,000 and 5,000 people.
Pisnents has launched a consultancy round on the redundancies, and the number of roles affected has not been confirmed.
This comes after the firm hired Ian Stott in August from Eversheds Sutherland to join Vario and lead the unit’s financial regulatory consulting section.
The London-headquartered law firm said in a statement shared with it is “optimising how we organise and deliver our services to best meet the needs of our clients and our business. This includes making some adjustments to Vario, our alternative legal service delivery model, and to our business operations function.”
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SUBSCRIBE HERE“We have built significant expertise and capability in alternative legal service delivery through Vario. We are ambitious about capitalising on that success, moving towards a model that embeds its people and capabilities more deeply within the wider firm,” they said.
The spokesperson added the move is “an important evolution” but that it is “assessing a range of options, including making greater use of the talent and capabilities available across our international network.
“Having listened to our clients and the market, that will strengthen how expertise is deployed to make alternative legal service delivery a more integrated component of how we deliver innovative and effective solutions for our clients.
“This means that some roles will be subject to consultation. We understand that this is an unsettling period for our colleagues and we are engaging directly with them to provide transparency and support throughout this period,” the spokesperson added.
Firm’s ‘misleading’ AI letters sent to court
In May, a High Court judge criticised Pinsent Masons after a lawyer sent the court AI-generated letters containing false legal information.
The judgment found that a junior solicitor at Pinsent Masons used AI to draft two “misleading” emails containing so-called hallucinations, sent to the High Court in March and April this year during an insolvency case in which the firm was acting for the applicants.
The firm apologised to the court following the incident and referred itself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), which will investigate further.
The law firm reported revenue of £703m for the 2025/26 financial year, up over three per cent from the previous year. But profit per equity partner (PEP) fell more than seven per cent to £740,000 from £797,000 the previous year, due to heavy investment in new offices, technology, and staff.