Modern Day David Maister Frameworks for an AI World

“Professional is not a label you give yourself—it’s a description you hope others will apply to you.” – David Maister

AI, automation, and demanding clients have stripped away the old protections of opacity and mystique in professional services. Clients can now see not only what you deliver, but how you work, which shortcuts you take, and whether your behaviour matches your claimed values.

This course uses the story of Fielding Partners, a fictitcious 40-lawyer commercial firm in London, to show how Maister’s frameworks apply when AI tools reshape research, drafting, staffing, and client expectations.

Through six concise modules, you will examine the real trade-offs between speed and judgement, margin and development, convenience and professionalism.

About David Maister

David Maister is widely recognized as the world's leading authority on the management of professional service firms. A former Harvard Business School professor, he spent decades consulting to law firms, consulting companies, accounting firms, and other professional partnerships across six continents before his retirement.

Course Overview

Many firms are asking “What tools should we buy?” when the more important question is “What kind of professionals and what kind of firm do we want to be in an AI-augmented world?”

Across one year in the life of ficticious Fielding Partners, you will follow five critical “moments of choice” in which partners and juniors must decide who they want to be: transparent or evasive, fast or thoughtful, margin-driven or development-led, expedient or ethical, everything-to-everyone or clearly positioned.

Each moment is built around realistic decisions about AI use in client work, staffing, and pricing, with Maister’s original insights framing the consequences.

The course connects Maister’s classic ideas on professionalism, firm economics, and trust with today’s pressures: client demands for speed, AI-enabled drafting, and the temptation to optimise this year’s margin at the expense of future capability and reputation.

Key Learning Outcomes

Understand what clients really buy in an AI world

• Distinguish between expertise, experience, and efficiency, and understand why judgement now differentiates trusted advisors from AI-enabled generalists
• Explain in plain language why your advice is better than what a smart client could obtain from tools and online research alone

Shape the firm you are building with AI

• Analyse how AI affects leverage, work mix, and staffing, and identify whether you are optimising margin or long-term capability
• Apply Maister’s insights on billable vs non-billable time to decide how to invest freed-up capacity in development, innovation, and client relationships

Act as a true professional in an AI-augmented practice

• Recognise new temptations: over-trusting model output, hiding behind “the system,” and using tools to save your time while increasing client risk
• Practice responses that put client interests first, including when AI output supports what the client wants but not what is ethically defensible

Build and protect trust when everything is visible

• Identify behavioural markers of trust in a digital, AI-heavy environment: clarity of written advice, transparency about tool use, and how you respond when things go wrong
• Differentiate clearly between a positioning based on speed and one based on depth and judgement, and understand the consequences of trying to be both

Make your own choices explicit

• Use five core questions to clarify what you personally will do differently in your practice, independent of firm-wide rhetoric or technology decisions
• Translate insights from Fielding Partners’ five moments—transparency, speed vs judgment, margin vs development, shortcut vs integrity, everything vs clarity—into your own context

Why This Course Matters

Technology magnifies whatever culture you already have. If your firm is genuinely client-focused, AI can make you more attentive, more thoughtful, and more trusted; if your firm is profit-focused with client service as a story, AI will make you more efficient at serving yourself.

This course does not tell you whether AI is good or bad. Instead, it gives you a Maister-style way of thinking about AI, forcing you to confront what your behaviour with technology says about your standards, your firm, and your promises to clients. By the end, you will have a clearer view of the firm you are helping to build—and of the professional you are choosing to be.

AI may change how work is done, but it does not change who is responsible for the quality of that work, the standards of the firm, or the promises made to clients. Your clients will use AI. Your competitors will use AI. You will use AI. But trust comes from people who choose to behave professionally. That remains human.

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