A couple of weeks ago I spoke with Jim Jones, a senior fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession, and the lead author of the annual report published by the school and Thomson Reuters on the state of the legal market.  

Our conversation centered on how midsize firms and specialty shops are capturing an increasing portion of the litigation pie and outperforming the rest of the market in terms of most key demand and profitability metrics. Jones told me that at large law firms, litigation has dipped from about 25% of the overall practice mix to something closer to 20% over the past decade, which got my attention. Since chatting with Jones, I’ve been chewing on a section of our conversation dealing with that shift that didn’t make it into my initial column.