Practice Areas Positioned For Winning Under The Trump Administration
Columnist Scott Mozarsky predicts which practice areas might pick up the most over the next four years.
President Donald Trump (by Ali Shaker/VOA)
As any pollster or Super Bowl broadcaster could tell you these days, predictions are dangerous business. Identifying the practice groups that are going to benefit most from the new administration in D.C., then, is a tall task indeed. The only thing I’m certain of myself is that uncertainty tends to create business for lawyers, and the new administration has, and will, introduce a lot of uncertainty for clients of major law firms.
Picking the brains of a few subject-matter experts at Bloomberg Law helped in honing my predictions about which practice areas might pick up the most over the next four years. I’ve identified some of my key consultants below, so that they may serve as scapegoats if any of my predictions go awry.
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Winning Practice Groups
Labor & Employment
The new administration is in the process of taking action to reverse key policies of the Obama Administration, in turn creating compliance questions for employers. Already, the administration has frozen several regulations in the labor and employment law space, including the Labor Department’s overtime rule and a regulation requiring employers to provide information on union-busting “persuader” activities. Victoria Roberts, Bloomberg Law’s Vice President and General Manager for Labor & Employment, tells me that management-side attorneys can also expect plenty of calls from employers making use of immigrant labor; they likely will face increased enforcement in the form of more rigorous I-9 employment verifications and even, potentially, workplace raids. Not to mention all the work being created by the administration’s recent attempts to temporarily suspend immigration from a number of countries. And as the administration takes steps to ease federal compliance requirements on employers, states and municipalities may jump into the fray, creating a pop in labor and employment legislative activity and need for counsel on developments on the state and local level.
Healthcare
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Counsel for health insurers, hospitals and health systems, and drug companies will have their hands full tracking the Republicans’ effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Scott Falk, Bloomberg Law’s Vice President and General Manager of Health and Litigation, believes hospitals will be particularly concerned about any attempt to reverse the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. If they occur, cuts to Medicaid and Medicare will place financial pressure on industry participants, further fueling consolidation and joint ventures between industry participants, such as medical service providers and payers. That has many analysts picking healthcare M&A as a hot area in 2017. Additionally, healthcare regulatory and compliance counsel will be busy as ever answering questions due to the ongoing policy uncertainty created by a new head of HHS and changing regulatory enforcement priorities.
Project Finance
Based on campaign promises and its actions thus far, the administration is highly likely to drive an uptick in construction and building, ranging from large infrastructure projects and improvements to a wall being built along the Mexican border. Reportedly, the administration has assembled a list of 50 projects requiring $137 billion in investment. With half of the projects to be privately funded according to a McClatchy report, that’s enough work to keep project finance and infrastructure attorneys occupied for quite a while.
Privacy and Data Protection
This is an area that simply has too much activity, and too many open questions, to be anything but hot over the next four (or maybe forty) years. On the basis of my discussions with Alex Butler, Bloomberg Law’s Vice President and General Manager of Privacy & Data Security, some of the key issues that privacy lawyers are grappling with include: the EU’s sweeping General Data Protection Regulations, which go into effect in May 2018; the potential fallout from litigation challenging the FTC’s authority to regulate in the data security area; the potential for privacy and data protection enforcement to supplement trade negotiations; and, until clarity comes from the Supreme Court, murkiness over the threshold standard for bringing class actions over data breaches. And that’s before the new administration even lifts a finger.
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M&A/Transactional
A number of factors should fuel an increase in M&A and transactional activity. The administration is encouraging companies to bring cash that they have stockpiled overseas back to the United States. Large technology companies and others are likely to respond by using some of that capital for buybacks, dividends, and M&A deals. Other key drivers are the strong equity markets and what feels like a more flexible and less strict approach to regulatory enforcement, particularly antitrust. That said, rising multiples and rising interest rates could create some friction slowing down volume of deals.
While I feel confident that the practice areas mentioned above will experience strong growth over the next few years, the reality is that given the uncertainty now prevailing in Washington, it’s hard to imagine any informed lawyer not being in high demand. A big challenge for firms is given how many strong lawyers there are out there, how can they differentiate their practices in these areas to bring in a disproportionate amount of the available engagements? Here’s one idea that is a bit of a teaser for my next column: the daily media flare ups and tweetapalooza coming from the White House should provide significant opportunities for lawyers to establish themselves as go-to experts in their relevant areas by being quoted in earned media. Firms that are nimble and engage in “newsjacking” activities will be well positioned to set themselves apart and ultimately drive more business.
Earlier: 3 Predictions For 2017
Scott Mozarsky is President of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg BNA’s Legal Division. In this role, he is accountable for driving growth of Bloomberg BNA’s legal products, including its flagship Bloomberg Law platform. You can reach Scott by email at SMozarsky@bna.com and follow him on Twitter at @smozarsky.
