Niels Bohr, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1922, once quipped, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future.” That said, predictions exist along a continuum, with those based merely on speculation on one end, and those deeply rooted in data on the other.

In preparing a forecast about some of the alternative legal services provider trends we expect to see in 2020, my team and I drew upon research surveying those who will have the greatest impact on those trends: in-house counsel and other buyers of legal services. While macroeconomic factors will undoubtedly affect in-house counsel decision-making in the year ahead, when it comes to their approach to utilizing ALSPs, it’s reasonable to expect that trends that began in 2019 will continue—and possibly pick up steam—in 2020. As another famous physicist, Sir Issac Newton, taught us, an object in motion tends to stay in motion.