The latest from the Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor Index (PMI) further supports the view that the legal market continues to struggle to gain ground. For background on the PMI, see our prior blog post on the subject.
You can read the entire report here.
Highlights include:
- Q2 performance is in line with the overall trend of flat-to-slightly-higher growth that has largely in place for the past three years.
Litigation, which comprises 40 percent of law firm billings, was down 1.5%, but patent and labor/employment work was slightly up.
Attorney headcount growth slowed (to 0.7%), but firms are still continuing to add new attorneys at a faster rate than attrition.
“Mergers and lateral hires – even sometimes of entire practice groups – are increasingly being employed as means to achieve growth. Growth is increasingly a zero-sum game that means taking business away from someone else.”