.Forward through the Storm: Law firms stick to their strategies despite the recession

The financial crisis, and the waves of redundancies that followed, have provoked fierce debate over whether large commercial law firms’ current model is fit for purpose. Key strategies during the boom time such as a strong focus on financial services clients, investment in transactional practices, and geographic expansion, have all been questioned. “This is a reset world,” one magic circle corporate partner puts it. “All bets are off. The game has changed.”

Certainly, law firms have been forced to adjust to the reduction in workflow, primarily through redundancies. But interviews by Chambers researchers with more than 40 law firm managing partners reveal that the central tenets of firms’ boomtime strategies remain largely unchanged.