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The 'Losing' Side of Legal Business Trends

BY Joseph B. Altonji
September 25, 2013

Recently, my partner Mike Short and I highlighted the current divide in the legal profession between “Winners and Losers” in a recent edition of LawVision Group's Newsletter (www.lawvisiongroup.com). Here, I would like to focus more on our advice to those firms that currently find themselves on the “losing” side of the divide. Before diving into that, however, it is worth summarizing the basic issue.

The Legal Industry Today: Winners and Losers

As has been discussed in depth, “growth” in the U.S. legal market has been minimal since we experienced a significant drop in demand in the fall of 2008. While individual practice demand has fluctuated and a few areas of practice have experienced some significant growth, overall the demand for lawyer time from U.S. commercial law firms has grown marginally at best, since 2008, in spite of a gradual improvement in the overall economy. There are multiple potential reasons for this general lack of growth, including shifting work in-house, increased usage of LPOs and other alternative providers and, most importantly, constant demands for efficiency improvements. Although happening slowly, project management and process improvement efforts, both formal and informal, are gradually improving the efficiency of U.S. legal practice, and in the process, off-setting whatever demand growth the economy would otherwise have produced.

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