Results from the first nine months of 2012 are in, and it appears increasingly likely that the legal industry will fall short of 2011′s low single-digit profit growth.
Not only did third-quarter revenue and demand growth slow from the first half of the year, demand actually posted a slight decline (-0.1 percent) compared to the third quarter of 2011, which marked the beginning of the current prolonged period of soft demand. Although expense growth also slowed during the third quarter of 2012, it continued to outpace revenue growth; in fact, the gap between the two widened, putting a further squeeze on profit margins.
