Philadelphia’s legal industry has reason to be cautiously bullish heading into 2022, based on recently released survey results that show an increase in demand for legal services, a stabilizing of billing cycles and lower-than-budgeted travel and events costs in the first three quarters of 2021.

But key indicators for the region were again outpaced by markets like New York, with its greater concentration of transactional legal work and Am Law 50 firms, according to the Wells Fargo legal specialty group’s survey, comparing the first nine months of 2021 to the same period in 2020.