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Law Firms Believe In Themselves... Don't Have Much Faith In The Rest Of Y'All

2019 isn't going to be much different than 2018 according to law firm leadership.

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It’s that time of the year where we check in on the confidence level of the leaders of America’s law firms. How are law firm leaders feeling? Not too good, as it turns out.

The Citi Private Bank Law Firm Group just released its confidence index for the first half of 2019 and — as usual — managing partners are quick to place faith in themselves to see modest demand growth over the next several months but they really don’t have much faith in the economy as a whole.

Fully 69 percent of respondents believe the U.S. economy will be the same or worse over the first half of the year and 84 percent feel that was about the global economy. Very few see it getting “considerably worse,” so that’s a silver lining. And yet 73 percent feel that demand for their services will grow over the same span and 64 percent see revenue on the upswing. Unless Citi only talked to bankruptcy-heavy firms, those numbers probably can’t jive. Okay, okay, bad economic times can bring on consolidation mergers and a whole host of litigation, so it’s not totally fair to give all the good news to bankruptcy, but you get the drift.

The good news for lawyers is that law firms are sufficiently confident in their own prospects that they’re still ready, willing, and able to expand with 73 percent expecting to increase associate headcount — 61 percent saying they plan to expand by more than 1 percent. The non-equity partner ranks are expected to grow at 51 percent of the firms surveyed and 56 percent of respondents expect to add to their equity partnership numbers (44 percent by more than 1 percent).

What’s the takeaway from all this? Mostly that law firm leaders see the next few months as an extension of the last several years. These numbers more or less track exactly how firms felt last year at this time. Were they true to their predictions back then? Yeah, more or less. The economy limped along — though the market proper showed show volatile highs and lows — demand crept up slowly — though elite firms enjoyed more success on this front than the rest of the legal community — and headcount has gone up.

So generally speaking, meet the new year, same as the old year.

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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