The ink was barely dry on our cover feature at the start of this year – an upbeat look at how the UK profession will evolve through the 2020s following a bruising decade – when a global pandemic hit. Despite an apocalyptic lockdown year, the piece – ‘The vision thing’ – has aged well and makes for interesting reading in the context of what has happened. But any optimism to be gleaned from our predictions for a resurgent legal profession over the next decade has been tempered in the current climate.
But as the Roaring Twenties came to an abrupt end in 1929 with the Wall Street Crash, so can we hope that this decade can work in reverse. It has started with a crisis but law firms, hardened by more than a decade of conditioning and resilience, are better placed to pick themselves up and dust themselves down.
Judging by the rhetoric coming from our Global 100 report, although no-one is foolish enough to say the good times are coming while we are mired in the era of Covid-19, political instability and a no-deal Brexit, there is clear defiance on show. We’ve been through this before. Few failed then. This time, we’re even better prepared. We are, after all, in the age of the $4bn law firm at a time when profit per equity partner seems far less important than just plain old equity.
And the words of Global 100 leaders show more than a token nod towards fresh priorities. In our profile of DLA Piper, chief executive Simon Levine is more interested in the firm being assessed on walking the walk on values rather than trying to defend its performance on key profitability metrics, while Akin Gump’s chair Kim Koopersmith says: ‘The pandemic has been very clarifying of what the true culture of a firm is.’
Allen & Overy’s recently installed global managing partner Gareth Price lays out a credible and simple blueprint for success that entails ‘staying close to our clients, looking after our people, contributing to the communities that we touch and continuing to innovate’. Meanwhile, back in July, John Cleland, managing partner of our 2019 Law Firm of the Year Pinsent Masons, said: ‘We firmly believe that if we continue to do business in the right way and for the right reasons, our business will come through this year strong, united and better than before.’ This was while announcing that PEP was down 12% year-on-year after profits were held back for investment.
The decade will be defined by doing things differently. Lessons have been learned from previous crises but things have changed. For example, in our February feature, we said: ‘Partnership itself will become moderately more flexible – expect to see 10% of partnerships at major firms on some form of flexible or part-time arrangement.’ With hindsight, this prediction seems wide of the mark in the era of homeworking and reassessment of priorities.
With this in mind, we would like to wish our readers a much better 2021. We’ve pressed ctrl-alt-del: now the reboot can begin in earnest.