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Remember Pan Am? It was the world’s largest international airline for much of the 20th century and an innovative pioneer in the modern airline industry. But when its management failed to appreciate the dramatic changes underway in the industry, it suffered a series of economic blows, and management’s last-ditch efforts to save it came too late.
The Thomson Reuters Institute, in its 2024 Report on the State of the US Legal Market, released today in partnership with the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law (whose URL returns a page not found), uses Pan Am’s story to drive home a simple point for U.S. law firms: Innovate or die.
“Law firm leaders who fail to respond to [changes in the legal market] and pivot quickly enough to prepare for the future may see their firms destined for the same fate as Pan Am,” the report warns.
The legal market has shifted, the report says, from “the Transactional Decade” of the 2010s, “a period marked by easy-to-borrow money and strong performance for law firms’ transactional practices,” to the period we are currently in where most of the growth in demand for law firm services has been driven by practices that run counter to general economic conditions, such as litigation, bankruptcy, and labor and employment.
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