The 2023 Report on the State of the Legal Market is being released today. The annual report is  jointly issued each year by the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law and the Thomson Reuters Institute. The report utilizes data from Thomson Reuters which shows the performance of U.S. law firms and analyses a variety of factors impacting that performance. Download the 2023 Report on the State of the Legal Market here.

Several key drivers of the bad news include the decline in profitability which surged in the pandemic, only to stall  as firms absorbed “return to the office” costs.. Expenses further ballooned due to inflation. Law firms once again entered into the talent war “space race” which translates to higher unsustainable salaries for young attorneys whose work can’t be billed to clients. Will law firms ever learn how “not to take the bait?”

Here are the three key take aways:
Continue Reading The 2023 Report on the State of the Legal Market — Yup It’s Bad

HBR Consulting (HBR),  a  leading legal industry  strategy, operations and technology consulting firm, has been acquired by private equity firm Renovus Capital (Renovus). The press release describes Renvous as a strategic capital partner. The agreement was effective November 10, 2022.

Renovus specializes in the knowledge and talent industries, with recent  investments in the legal services space. They previously invested in LAC Group which like HBR offered consulting and management of library/information services.  “The legal industry remains in the early stages of digital and operational transformation,” said Renovus founding partner Jesse Serventi. “As we scanned the legal marketplace as part of our investments in LAC Group and Wilson Allen, HBR routinely came up as a firm at the cutting-edge of this movement.”

Here is an excerpt from a message they are sending to customers:

The agreement will separate HBR’s traditional advisory and IT managed services businesses into two separate entities.

Matt Sunderman will assume the role of CEO of HBR Consulting. HBR Consulting co-founders Christopher Petrini-Poli and Nicholas
Continue Reading HBR Acquired by PE Firm – To Join LAC in Renovus Professional Services Portfolio

Everyone welcome’s a crystal ball.  The second anniversary of the pandemic lockdowns  is only a few months away. Law firms which had been resisting remote staffing trends adapted to the virtual workplace overnight. The urgency of D&I initiatives moved to the forefront. Entire new subspecialties emerged in legal practice. The Bloomberg Law 2022 Series explores

Leopard Solutions which provides a leading competitive intelligence and business development  platform, has released their 2020 State of the Legal Industry Report which examines law firm hiring trends since the beginning of the pandemic.
A copy of the report is available at this link.
Webinar Today. They are also hosting  a webinar today Thursday

One of the few silver linings of the 2008 financial crisis was that many lawyers were shocked into budget consciousness. Seemingly overnight, lawyers became willing to reassess old assumptions. Maybe they could live without personal copies of treatises. Maybe they would try online resources that they had resisted. The crisis has passed but the changed legal market place remains. Law firms that want to invest in new technologies must subsidize those investments with lean budget practices that continuously reassess all ongoing costs. No product is a “slam dunk” for annual renewal in 2019 without some “due diligence.”

Here are some tips to help your “harvest” saving which can be reinvested in “nextgen” resources.

Focus on ROI. Products such as Research Monitor and Onelog can provide invaluable insights into the number of lawyers who actually use web-based products.  Products are often maintained based on 
Continue Reading It’s Budget Time! 12 Timely Tips to Help Manage Law Firm Costs

It seems like only yesterday that Joan Axelroth and I were Co-Chairs of the 2012 PLL Summit themed as “The Road to 2020.”   That year’s Keynote Speaker was Jordan Furlong, a leading legal industry consultant who inspired the audience with a talk entitled  “Climbing the Value Ladder. Rethinking the Law Library on the Road to 2020” 

Keynote: Jordan Furlong

Furlong is back and this years Summit theme is “The Road to 2030.”  In retrospect, many of Furlong’s predictions about the transformation of libraries and the morphing of librarians into a wide spectrum of knowledge and technology roles have materialized. I am looking forward to another inspiring Furlong road map suggesting how we should respond to the changes ahead.

The keynote will highlight how the growing power and sophistication of legal intelligence will dovetail with and help to accelerate the transformation of law firms’ client services and business models. Furlong will describe how law librarians, knowledge engineers, and data analysts will play
Continue Reading Registration Closing for PLLIP Summit: The Road to 2030 with Jordon Furlong Keynote and Design Thinking Workshop

Today Thomson Reuters is announcing the release of a major new workflow and pricing solution called Panoramic. The product merges features of Practical Law their knowledge management platform with their cloud based accounting solution 3E.

Several years ago I had an opportunity to see an early version of Panoramic when it was known as Project