Worldwide craze

Leave aside the impact of communications and technology on the legal industry, and one of the key things that stands out in any comparison between today and 20 years ago is the sheer size and international reach of today’s market.

In that time, the LB100 market has grown by some 31,000 lawyers and seen revenue soar by more than 400% to £14.18bn. Thirty per cent of all lawyers in the LB100 are now based abroad, compared to approximately 5% in 1990, when LB first hit desks. Twenty years ago, only Clifford Chance could boast of having 500 lawyers, but now almost a quarter of LB100 firms can claim as much. Ten even have more than 1,000 lawyers. In fact, there are almost as many LB100 lawyers abroad now (16,000) as there were lawyers in the entire UK top 100 in 1990 (18,000).

Thanks to international mergers, the two largest firms –Linklaters and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer – have grown by approximately four and a half times in headcount terms over the past two decades. That has led to huge gains in efficiency; revenues have increased by roughly eight times for Linklaters and more than ten times for Freshfields since 1992 alone, the first year in which figures were published.

On a compound basis, the LB100 has been growing at an average of 11% a year, every year, since 1993. The change can be summed up as the advent of the era of the ‘law of big numbers’, as one senior lawyer neatly puts it. On these measures, law has done astonishingly well – it is perhaps one of the biggest unsung successes of British trade.

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