If you have used My Legal Connect for more than a couple of briefs, you have probably noticed an asymmetry in how we handle rates. Buyers see the daily rate of every lawyer on their shortlist before they engage. Lawyers do not see what other lawyers on the platform charge. Not by accident, not because we have not gotten around to building it, but because we sat down early in the design of the platform and made a deliberate call that this was the right shape for the product.
A few sophisticated users have asked about it. Some of them framed it as a bug. A few framed it as a values question, usually some version of "if you really believe in transparency, surely you would show rates to everyone." This post is the long answer.
The standard line, and why it is operationally naive
The default position in any marketplace conversation in 2026 is that transparency is good, more information is better, and any opacity is suspicious until proven otherwise. It is an easy line to take, and on most marketplaces it is roughly correct. Buyers benefit from seeing prices. Sellers benefit from seeing demand. Everyone benefits from a public record.
The problem is that "transparency is good" is a slogan, not a design principle. Real marketplaces have asymmetric information problems on different sides of the trade, and the question for a product team is not "should we be transparent" but "which side of the market has the information gap we need to close." Get that wrong and you can pour transparency into a marketplace and make it worse.
In legal talent, the buyer is the side with the information gap. A general counsel or operations lead briefing out a piece of corporate work is, on most days, comparing three or four lawyers they have never engaged before, in a market where rate cards are a state secret and partner introductions get treated like a negotiation. The buyer needs to see rates before they engage, full stop. Anything else is a sales call dressed up as a product.
The lawyer is not the side with the information gap. The lawyer knows what they charge. They know what their year looks like. They know what the matter in front of them is worth to them. They do not need to see what the lawyer in the next tile charges to do their job well. In fact, as we will get into, showing them tends to make the market worse, not better.
If you want the mechanics of how this plays out on a live brief, the how it works page walks through the buyer flow end to end.
What happens when lawyers can see each other's rates
We have watched enough adjacent marketplaces (consulting, design, dev contracting, even some early legal platforms overseas) to have a reasonably strong prior on what happens when supplier-side rate visibility gets turned on. Two patterns show up almost immediately, and they pull in opposite directions, which is part of why the damage is hard to spot at first.
The first pattern is rate inflation. Once a top-percentile rate becomes visible, every lawyer in the same band gets a reference point for "what someone like me could be charging." A few weeks later, rates drift up across the band, not because the matters got harder or the lawyers got better but because everyone is now negotiating against the highest visible number. The platform looks more expensive, win rates per brief drop, and the buyer side starts to feel like the product is moving away from them.
The second pattern is rate compression. The median becomes the gravitational centre. Lawyers charging below the median move up to match. Lawyers charging above the median feel pressure to justify the gap and often quietly come down. The distribution narrows. Variety dies. The buyer ends up with a shortlist of three lawyers all charging within a few hundred dollars a day of each other, which is precisely the failure mode that sent them to a platform in the first place.
Both patterns are anchoring effects, not market efficiency. The lawyers are not getting better information about their own worth. They are getting a number to anchor on, and human beings are very bad at ignoring a salient number even when they know intellectually that it has nothing to do with them.
The third pattern, which is slower and harder to see, is supply integrity erosion. When rates are visible across the supply side, lawyers start optimising for the rate game instead of the work. They start declining matters that would not show well next to their rate, padding scopes to justify rate moves, and gaming the visible signals. The platform starts feeling less like a place to do good work and more like a leaderboard. We do not want a leaderboard. We want a place where senior lawyers get sent senior work at fair rates, and the work is the point.
The buyer needs to see rates. Full stop.
Cut the other direction now. A buyer arrives with a brief. We come back inside four hours with three vetted senior lawyers, conflicts pre-cleared, fixed fee where the matter allows. The buyer has to make a decision. If the rates are hidden, the buyer has to engage to find out. Engagement is the expensive step, both in time and in the social cost of pulling out once a conversation has started. Hiding rates from the buyer is how you turn a product into a sales funnel, and the whole reason a legal talent platform exists is to not be a sales funnel.
So the buyer sees the daily rate of each lawyer on the shortlist. They see the scope. They see the conflicts position. They see the experience markers. They make a call before any human time gets burned. That is the product. The buyers page goes into the rest of what they see at the shortlist stage.
The interesting thing is that buyer-side rate visibility does not cause the pathologies that supplier-side visibility causes. Buyers are not anchoring against each other. Each buyer is making a one-shot decision on a single matter against their own budget and their own internal benchmarks. Buyer-side rate visibility behaves the way the slogan promises. Supplier-side does not.
The structural parallel: salary bands
The cleanest analogue is how grown-up companies handle salary bands. Most large employers in Australia now publish salary ranges to the market. Job ads carry bands. Recruiters quote bands. The buyer side of the labour market (candidates) gets to see the range before they engage. This is good. It saves everyone time and it closes a real information gap.
Those same companies almost never publish individual salaries internally. Pay bands, yes. Specific numbers attached to specific employees, no. The reason is not that they are hiding something shady. The reason is that internal salary visibility has been studied to death and the result is consistent: it does not produce more fairness, it produces more anchoring, more disengagement, and more bizarre comparative behaviour. People are bad at processing the actual reasons for pay differences. They are very good at noticing a number next to a colleague's name and feeling something about it.
We are applying the same logic. Publish to the buyer. Do not publish across the supplier side. The reasoning is not novel. It is just unusual to see a marketplace name it out loud.
What we get for the trade
In practice, the design has held up over our first year of operating it. A few things we can point to without inventing numbers:
Supply rates have been stable over time. Lawyers on the platform set a rate when they onboard and revise it on their own schedule, usually annually, sometimes when a major matter type shifts in their practice. We do not see the quarterly drift you would expect if a rate race were on. People price themselves and move on with their work.
Rate-shopping behaviour, the kind where a lawyer pings support to ask what they should be charging "to be competitive," is rare. When it happens, our answer is the same: charge what you charge, and we will match you to matters where that rate makes sense. The conversation usually ends there. Lawyers who came in from other platforms are sometimes surprised by this. They are used to being nudged.
Matching to matter difficulty is more honest. Because rates are set once and not constantly being repositioned against peers, we can match a rate to a scope without the lawyer feeling like they have to perform for an audience of other lawyers. The conversation is between the buyer, the lawyer, and us. That is the right number of parties in the room.
If you want to see what a lawyer actually sees when they engage with the platform, the for lawyers page lays out the supplier-side flow.
What the lawyer does see
To be clear, lawyers on the platform are not flying blind. Hiding peer rates is not the same as hiding context. Here is what a lawyer sees on every brief we send them:
Their own rate, prominent and editable. We never obscure what they are charging. They set it, we show it back to them.
The buyer's budget signal for the matter. This is the critical input. The buyer puts a budget on the brief. The lawyer sees it. If the budget is well below the lawyer's rate for the scope, the lawyer declines without needing to ask anyone what is normal. If the budget is in range, the lawyer proposes. If the budget is high relative to the scope, the lawyer can flag that the scope might be lighter than the buyer thinks. All of this is a real conversation about the matter.
The matter scope, the conflicts position, the urgency, and the buyer's identity at the point of engagement. The lawyer has every input they need to decide whether to take the work. They just do not have a list of what other lawyers on the platform charge for similar work, because that input is not useful to the decision and it is harmful to the market.
Is this fair to lawyers
The question we get most directly is whether the asymmetry is fair to the supply side. We think it clearly is, for four reasons we can name out loud.
First, lawyers set their own rate. We do not impose it, cap it, or pressure it. If a lawyer wants to charge well above the market, they can, and they will get matched to matters where that rate makes sense. If they want to charge below the market, same. The rate is theirs.
Second, lawyers see the buyer's budget. The information asymmetry that matters in any individual transaction is not "what does the lawyer in the next tile charge." It is "what is this specific buyer willing to spend on this specific matter." We close that gap directly, on every brief, no guessing.
Third, decline is frictionless and stigma-free. A lawyer can decline a brief in one click without writing a paragraph, and the decline does not penalise them in the matching algorithm. The right answer to a brief that does not suit you is no, said quickly, and we have designed for that.
Fourth, decline data does not flow into other lawyers' rate-setting. If you decline a brief because the budget was too low for the scope, that signal stays between you and us. It does not get aggregated into a market signal that pushes other lawyers' rates around. The integrity of each lawyer's rate-setting stays with that lawyer.
The underlying principle
The principle, if we have to give it a name, is this. Not every transparency is virtuous. Transparency is a design choice, and like any design choice it has to be aimed at a real problem. The right question is not "should we be transparent" but "which side of the trade has the information asymmetry we are here to fix, and what does showing them solve."
In legal talent, the buyer has the asymmetry. We fix it by showing rates. The lawyer does not. Showing them peer rates would not give them more information about their own worth, it would give them an anchor, and the market would get worse for everyone, including the lawyer.
We will keep this design. If we ever change it, we will say so out loud and explain what changed in the world that made the old answer wrong. Until then, the rates page is for the buyer, and the lawyer gets the rest of the product, which is the matter, the budget, the scope, and a fast yes or no.
Brief in, three vetted senior lawyers out, in four hours.
My Legal Connect matches in-house General Counsel with senior Australian lawyers. Pre-cleared conflicts, published daily rates, fixed-fee engagement letters.