Law Firm Performance 2004 ' Highlights

During the past 2 years, we often heard the dire predictions about the profession that seem to accompany every downturn in the business cycle:

• “Corporate work will never come back to pre-recession levels.”
• “The tech firms will never recover.”
• “Hourly rates cannot continue to rise.”
• “Associate salaries will not increase as they did in the pre-recession period.”

Frankly, we never believed there was much truth in any of these conclusions. The simple fact is that, when all is said and done, law firms ' like most industries ' follow fairly predictable business cycles. For the past 2 years, the legal industry has gone through an economic downturn, but there is every indication that we are now back in a growth phase, with all that entails. Moreover, the profession came through the recent recession in very good shape.