What motivates today’s buyers of legal services? How are law firms positioning themselves to take advantage of the opportunities coming their way? We partnered with FTI Consulting to deliver an in-depth report on the relationship between buy-side and sell-side in legal, and found some surprising results.
Law firms face more competition than ever before and while most would expect the threat to come from other firms or new market entrants, they may have underestimated the threat posed by their own clients, who, our research suggests, are building up their own in-house teams and planning to keep more work in-house over the course of the next year.
In order to stay competitive, many firms have already started getting to grips with their cost base, taking advantage of lower cost regions, using contract lawyers and embracing new technologies and processes to help them deliver legal services differently. In the aftermath of the EU referendum and the prevailing economic uncertainty, embracing efficiency will be as important as ever for firms.
But do these changes mark a new chapter in law firm/client relations? Were they exactly what clients had been searching for from their lawyers or were law firms running the risk of losing what makes them stand out from the crowd in the first place?
These were some of the questions we asked to more than 200 decision-makers from in-house legal departments and the top 100 UK law firms in Spring/Summer 2016. This report summarises our findings; we hope you find it insightful. Click here to download the report: ‘Are buyers and sellers of legal services colliding or aligning?’
