There’s no scarcity of legal industry reports chorusing the refrain: margins are flat; corporate counsel are increasingly taking more work in house; law firms aren’t responding in kind.
Perhaps this was most clearly echoed in the 2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market published by Peer Monitor and Georgetown Law Center for Study of the Legal Profession:
Clients today are more willing than ever before to disaggregate matters […] are more open than ever before to utilizing non-traditional service providers (including non-law firms) to provide a wide range of services previously obtained almost exclusively from law firms. And clients are far more likely today to retain work in-house, bringing their outside counsel in only where needed to supply specialized expertise or to handle matters on a discrete project by project basis.
