There’s a lot of noise at the moment in the discussions of big law firms and their business. The messages can be confusing, even contradictory. Growth is over! (Except for those firms that keep growing.) Demand is down! (Oops, except maybe in the fourth quarter of 2012.) There’s a crisis in productivity! (Caused perhaps by measuring only whether more lawyer time is logged and not whether the work is getting done more efficiently.)
Pity the poor planning officer who has to make sense out of this cacophony. With everyone talking at herconsultant, vendor, banker, futurist, pundit (guilty am I)it’s hard to hear a word they’re saying. To be fair, it’s not just the chattering classes at fault; it may be the nature of the market itself. It turns out that the Big Law world isn’t a single organism that behaves in a linear manner. Rather, it’s a series of microclimates that these days vary widely. Lawyers in the same firmlawyers on the same corridorare setting records for both hours and inactivity. Everyone feels the anxiety but not the same degree of pain. To paraphrase the old joke, when my partner’s practice collapses, it’s a recession; when mine dies, it’s a depression.
