Law firms are, by and large, planning to make their numbers this year. No one will confuse 2023 with the gangbusters results of the last few years, but most firms avoided the financial devastation that triggered broad layoffs in select practice areas at some firms.
But while the inflation and the “recession that never was” fade into the rearview mirror, firms may find a looming structural challenge coming from their clients.
The Association of Corporate Counsel and Everlaw just put out a new report titled The State of Collaboration in Corporate Legal Departments, collecting the thoughts of “370 chief legal officers, general counsel, other in-house counsel and legal operations professionals from U.S. corporate law departments.”
And it turns out a whole lot of them intend to move more work off Biglaw plates in the coming year.
In fairness, legal departments almost always signal that they’re bringing work in-house right before they crunch the numbers and remember that even high-priced Biglaw help is cheaper than hiring the cadre of full-time employees necessary for those tasks. But in 2022, only 59 percent expected to bring more in-house, so this is a troubling trend line. Adding in the 39 percent looking to shift to smaller firms and it’s a grim survey for Biglaw.
And what a difference a year makes for artificial intelligence, with almost triple the buy-in from last year’s survey conducted before ChatGPT delivered AI’s mainstream breakthrough. Artificial intelligence isn’t...
"These people are leading the country towards religious fanaticism, religious bigotry, racism, and even towards war," says the Sinhala-language caption of a Facebook graphic shared on May 2, 2026....