The Legal Top 20…in 2019
Date: 27 November 2009
Issue: Online only
Categories: News
A scattering of magic circle names appear in the future elite listing, but not always in familiar form: Freshfields (incorporating Allen & Overy) comes in third, while Clifford Baker Piper is ranked fifth (beaten to fourth place by Aviva Legal Insurance Services).
Conference chairman, James Thorne, partner, Farrer & Co says the list would be dominated by new entrants, merged firms, accountants’ law firms, and listed providers of commoditised services.
“Against a generally flat legal market the panel saw the lion’s share consolidating into fewer hands and the virtual elimination of High Street practices as we know them today,” he adds.
Mark Jones, panel member and chairman of Addleshaw Goddard LLP, says: “Law firms are going to have to rethink the way they deliver service: either they re-engineer their product so that they can deliver it at a price the customer wants to pay, or they lose money, or they get out of the market.”If law firms prove to be incapable of adapting in that way,
Jones says that they will be vulnerable to encroachment from legal process outsourcing businesses which are already “established, scalable, well run, ambitious and hungry".
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