Locating The Puck

The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law – the brainchild of my colleagues Mitt Regan and Jeff Bauman – has just issued it 2015 report on the State of the Legal Market.

From the introduction

Hockey legend Wayne Gretzky once explained the secret to success in his sport by noting that “A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”

Gretzky’s observation has often been cited for its obvious relevance to the process of business strategy, and it seems particularly apt for law firm leaders in the current environment. In the six and a half years since then onset of the Great Recession, the market for legal services has changed in fundamental — and probably irreversible — ways.  Perhaps of greatest significance has been the rapid shift from a sellers’ to a buyers’ market, one in which clients have assumed control of all of the fundamental decisions about how legal services are delivered and have insisted on increased efficiency, predictability, and cost effectiveness in the delivery of the services they purchase. This shift in the dynamics of the market, coupled with at best modest growth in the demand for legal services, the decision of many corporate clients to shift more legal work in-house, the growing willingness of clients to disaggregate services among many different service providers, and the growth in market share of non-traditional competitors, have all combined to produce a much more intensely competitive market for legal services than existed prior to 2008.

Over the past five years, law firms have responded to these market changes in a variety of ways. They have become more adept at responding to RFPs and participating in competitive selection processes; they have become more proficient indeveloping and working under project budgets and in responding to client demands for alternative fee arrangements and they have begun to develop project management capabilities as well as the skills needed to partner with other providers in disaggregated service settings. For the most part, however, these changes have been in response to specific client pressures. They have not generally resulted from law firms themselves taking a longer range view of the changes impacting the legal market and restructuring their services to meet likely client expectations in the future. In other words, to use the Wayne Gretzky metaphor, they represent playing where the puck is and not where it is going to be

Congrats to Mitt and Jeff and the center’s staff for their thought-provoking work (Mike Frisch)