At our Business Leadership Summit last month the clear and consistent message from private practice leaders, in-house lawyers and experts from outside the market (notably our excellent keynote speakers Nicola Millard of BT and Graham Scrivener of Kotter International) was that, regardless of a firm’s size, the challenges it faces are the same as its rivals.
Pesky Millennials, ever-changing workplace requirements and, above all, the impact of new technology are giving everyone a headache. While the Summit could not answer every question, it did at least point the way to your potential future.
The UK 200: The Independents report, which is published today and highlights many of the themes on show at the Summit, performs a similar service (see executive preview starting on p14). Naturally, as this is the UK 200, the report is a benchmarking datafest. This year there are 100 pages crammed with statistics detailing the fortunes of the 100 UK firms that inhabit the crowded revenue battleground of, broadly, £10m to £20m.
This is the sector that has produced the likes of DWF, Shakespeare Martineau and Burness Paull. How many more will this part of the market generate? Most likely quite a few, judging by the current pace of change. Okay, it’s true that the mid-market still exists and the UK is yet to be dominated by a handful of megafirms, but you only need to consider the issues driving the CMS, Nabarro and Olswang three-way merger talks to understand that similar ripples are coursing through the rest of the UK 200.
Couple that with the inexorable rise and impact of technology and the ever-refining processes gearing up to deliver legal services and the inevitable conclusion is that a bunch of the firms that inhabit this year’s ranking will be swallowed up by more nimble, more aggressive and better-funded competitors in the coming months and years.
Talking of competition, you most likely noticed that on today’s cover we have a pic of a beaming Matthew Layton, Clifford Chance’s global managing partner. It goes without saying that the giants of the market are facing many of the same issues as their smaller cousins, but they do have rather larger budgets to assist them (see Norton Rose Fulbright’s £100m spend on IT).
As Layton outlines in Dearbail Jordan’s profile (p10), the key for Clifford Chance and the market as a whole is to learn from the experience of other industries as they have adapted to change.
“As an industry, we’re in for at least a decade of fairly rapid change, certainly in comparison to what we’ve seen over the past 20 years,” says Layton.
Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
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