The well-known legal business consulting firm Hildebrandt Baker Robbins just published a report of its Peer Monitor Index, which includes information about key law firm business metrics for April – June of 2011.
We’ve regularly blogged about the Peer Monitor system before, but to refresh you , it is a service that allows law firms to access their peers’ financial data (in the aggregate) in exchange for supplying their own data to the system for others to access (on a normalized and aggregated basis). There are 35 Am Law 100 firms, 35 Am Law 200 firms and 30 NLJ 250 firms in the system. You can find more information about the Peer Monitor system here.
You can read a summary of the report here.
Among other things, the report shows that — very much in line with how the overall economy performed in Q 2 — the market (at least for large law firm legal services) gained a bit for the third quarter in a row. However, the “soft patch” that the economy recently hit is causing law firms to “prepar[e] for continued uncertainty and monitor[] headwinds and risk factors.”
Bottom line: “While the law firm market continues to show gradual improvement, growth is still well below historical averages, and a myriad of cautionary factors remain in place, including client rate pressures and
rising costs.”