Today law firms are challenged to maintain profitability in a buyer’s market for legal services. The 2017 and 2018 reports on the state of the legal market by The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at the Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters observed a flattening demand for law firm services. The reports also document a loss of market share to alternative legal service providers, such as Axiom and UnitedLex, which have developed new models for delivering legal services. Also, corporate legal departments are accomplishing an increasingly amount of legal work in-house.
Beyond the competition from alternative legal service providers and client legal departments, the “2018 Citi Hildebrandt Client Advisory” identified that the Big Four accounting firms (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC) have built up their legal departments with integrated service offerings to compete with law firms. “ The 2017 Global 100,” by the American Lawyer, observed that the Big 4 use multi-point client relations, and build solution sets for business issues. And ALM Intelligence’s “The Big 4 Are at the Door” reports that the accounting firms are better positioned to meet the needs of future legal departments than traditional law firms. And the Big Four’s legal services are no longer exclusive of the US. Last year, PwC launched ILC Legal in the District, marking a continuing push into the law firm market by the Big Four.
