The latest update on how the Australian legal market is fairing through COVID was published by Thomson Reuters Institute and Melbourne Law School yesterday (29 August 2022).

Some of my key take-aways from this ‘The 2022 Australia: State of the Legal Market Report‘ include:

• FY22 (defined as being 1 July to 30 June) was a tale of two halves. In the first half, 1 July to 31 December, Australian law firms smashed it out of the park (6.4% growth in the first half), but the second half was much harder going and the market declined 2.1%, representing its weakest quarterly return since 2013
• Drivers of growth were all the usual crowd: mergers & acquisitions, banking & finance, etc
• Retention – especially at the Associate level – is a major concern with 31.6%, roughly one-third, of Australian associates having decided to move on from their firm over the past 12 months
• Law firms are trying to counter this attrition rate by offering their star Associates more money, which makes sense when you consider how much it costs to replace lawyers, but more recently Associate demands have included demands outside of pure financial reward – including a belief that the firm is taking a strategic direction that aligns with their values
• Your firm’s reputation in the marketplace is important if you want to keep your Associates
• Diversity IS important:
  

Global research from the Thomson Reuters Institute found that female lawyers and/or those from under-represented demographics, as well as those who identified as LGBTQ+, were the most likely to leave their current firms.

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• Lawyers in Australia from diverse backgrounds are NOT feeling the love:

lawyers from diverse backgrounds gave notably lower-than-average marks in both their own well-being and their leadership demonstrating the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as compared to lawyers with non-diverse backgrounds

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Anyone who has read the ‘2021 Annual Profile of Solicitors‘ by the Law Society of NSW should be able to tell you why that’s a problem that’s not going away unless law firms demonstrate a change.

• Innovation remains important, even though we are not actually too sure what that means as we continue to draw a hard line between “innovation” and “technology”

That said, there is a really cool ‘Innovation adoption checklist‘ on page 23 that is worth the download by itself!

• Partners are leading the utilisation charge – there may be a whole host of reason given for this from “clients want partner time on the matter” to “we don’t want to over burden our associates because they may leave us” but an annual average utilisation rate of slightly over 1,200 billable hours tells me some lawyers out there are working very hard

• Last, but by no way least, is an amazing graph on pages 26 and 27 that sets out the ‘4 roles of a law firm partner’ which is brilliant and makes me wish I had created it!

Well done it all involved and make sure you read the report.

As usual, comments are my own.

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