No doubt about it, leaders of Am Law 200 firms are upbeat about the future. Eighty-nine percent of respondents to our annual firm leaders survey said they are optimistic about 2006, almost exactly the proportion who expressed optimism last year and the year before that. Only 11 percent of the respondents to our latest survey said they were uncertain about the future, and none said they were pessimistic.
That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of frustrations too. For the first time, this year’s survey asked respondents to name their greatest disappointment with their firms in the past year. The result was a host of woes: soft demand for transactional work, a dearth of qualified lateral partners, the inability to open offices in London or China, a failure to grow enough in New York, and lawyer productivity that fell short of expectations (especially grating after increases of more than 9 percent in gross revenue and profits per partner in 2004).
