The flap-and-panic of year end has come and gone, but for law firm managers, it heralds the start of the ‘navel-gazing season’ – a time when senior members of the partnership struggle their way through a seemingly endless progression of spreadsheets, in an attempt to benchmark the firm against its rivals and to predict the way the market might move over the next 12 months. This season is underpinned by charts and tables published by the legal press.
These tables are crucial market intelligence for anyone whose job requires that they understand how the legal industry works. Every year, I look for evidence in law firms’ financials that one firm or other is finally breaking through and is demonstrably, beyond doubt, getting competitive advantage from its use of IT.
