A few highlights from The American Lawyer’s just-released annual law firm leaders survey:
- Five years in to the Great Reset, the way clients buy legal services has settled into a new normal:
- In-house capabilities are expanding;
- Price/fee pressure is relentless;
- Work is being pushed to cheaper suppliers (which, yes, includes LPO’s, but also most definitely includes boutiques, and smaller and regional firms with kinder and gentler cost structures);
- And the battle for market share is on.
- We as an industry are running out of running room on cost-cutting our way to profitability.
- As Cooley’s CEO Joe Conroy says, “We’ve played this game as an industry for a number of years where we’ve gotten leaner and meaner, but there’s a limit on stripping our costs and lowering rates.”[Here’s where you really have to start paying attention]
- Four out of five expect the economic “recovery” in the US to remain on the same pace in 2014 or—get this—slow down, while 70% believe the same for Europe
- I have a question for the 30% who think European growth will speed up: Please explain to me how a 28-member bloc of countries (17 of whom have adopted the euro) can have a single currency without political, socioeconomic, or central banking harmonization. So far it’s not working. And Latvia’s knocking on the door.
- Maybe this would be easier: Explain why this chart makes you more optimistic about the Eurozone than the US:
The people who responded to those polls aren’t necessarily more optimistic about Europe in absolute terms – they are just more optimistic about Europe improving past performance, but since Europe has performed worse in the past few years, it can achieve improvement without actually surpassing the US in terms of growth rate.