ABA Journal. Bill Henderson has been following these legal services providers for some time. While most of them are not huge in terms of total revenue, they continue to grow and multiply. They are one of the key reasons we shouldn't expect the next 20 years to be like the last 20 years. (h/t: TaxProf Blog and lots of other sites in the blawgosphere.) Excerpt:
Johnston isn’t the only corporate client seeking alternative legal service providers and partnerships over the sole reliance on traditional firms—at a hefty swipe at those firms’ bottom lines. In fact in 2012, Novus Law claims, it saved another of its corporate clients nearly $3 for every dollar spent on work originally tasked to another firm. For every $3 it saved the client, Novus Law earned $1 in fees.
That means the client’s law firm lost $4 for every dollar paid to Novus Law.
Or look at it this way: 2012 revenue for the top 100 U.S. firms totaled more than $70 billion, according to American Lawyer magazine. Since the recession hit the legal profession in 2007, these firms have grown in headcount, often through mergers and the absorption of lawyers from several law firm failures. But on a per-lawyer basis, revenue has been essentially flat.
Novus Law, by contrast, is tripling its revenue year over year. And as Novus and many other legal vendors snatch millions of dollars in work typically done by traditional law firms, the growth of the Am Law 100 could disappear completely.