Law 21 has posted a wonderful precis of what the US legal market will start to look like next year, entitled The New Leverage
Law.21 writes:
Bad news on the economic front continues to pile up — you don’t need the links from me — and the legal profession is finding its ride increasingly bumpy as a result. Wachovia’s legal specialty group reports that partners in large law firms are bringing in less revenue for the first time since approximately the Industrial Revolution. But it also points out an overlooked fact: despite all the talk about associate layoffs, it’s staff that’re really taking the hit at firms, down 18% in September alone. That suggests a couple of things: that some firms really are taking steps to retrain or otherwise hold onto their associates (and there’s good reason to do so, says Bruce MacEwen), but also that these firms aren’t looking as far down the road as maybe they should.
Looking down that road are the good people at The American Lawyer and Legal OnRamp who, with the assistance of consultant Rees Morrison, recently conducted a survey of in-house counsel members of Legal OnRamp. The survey (disclosure: I made small contributions during the design process) asked in-house lawyers about their relationships with outside counsel and their predictions about how those relationships and in-house practices will evolve over the next five years. Topics of inquiry included client satisfaction surveys, value billing, outsourcing, commoditization, automation, consolidation, and social networking.
The thrust of the results is that in-house lawyers aren’t especially happy with outside counsel in terms of service, partnering and communication — nothing new there — but are surprisingly tentative about predicting major change in how they go about acquiring services from these law firms. Very surprising, actually, as Michael Grodhaus says in reference to another study “in which 32% of 600 corporate executives predicted significant changes in law firm billing practices over the next two years. … So in the face of what is likely to be the worst financial crisis in this country since the 1981-82 recession — two-thirds of these corporate executives expect to continue to be billed by the hour for legal services just as they have always been? Where are their shareholders?”
Read the full piece at
http://www.law21.ca/2008/12/12/the-new-leverage/
