There’s nothing like a bit of market melodrama to bring out the prophets of legal services doom. You’ve heard the spiel: the party’s over; the legal market is an unsustainable bubble; law is, like, totally backward and must embrace stuff that has been happening in other industries for ages. Hmmmm.

Now it may well be that the dramatic growth of the largest legal firms over the last 20 years has run its course. Likewise, fundamental change could yet be forced on legal service providers by technology, clients or both. But, as yet, I have yet to see a trigger point to back up the more extreme claims. Also, some of the doom-mongers haven’t come up with much of a reason for revolution beyond the fact that, er, they think that there should be.