While the spending for outside corporate counsel has beencontinuously on the rise in recent years – nearly doubling in the past fiveyears alone – the trend is finally starting to slow down, according to recentdata compiled by BTI Consulting Group.
In BTI’s PremiumPractices Forecast 2008, which analyzes more than 1,600 interviews withcorporate counsel at large and Fortune 1000 companies, the group finds that theprojected market growth for the year (6.1 percent) will barely cover rateincreases. Additionally, more corporate counsel plan to decrease spending thisyear than in the past five years, and three practices show net declines for2008: corporate, employment, and environmental.
Moreover, the percent of legal dollars going to outsidecounsel shrank last year. The reversal, the forecast finds, while appearingsmall, is substantial. And key practice areas – such as compliance, regulatory,tax and merger & acquisition (M&A – see an increasing amount of dollarsstemming from outside of the legal department.
Adding to that, nearly 40 percent of corporate counselcurrently describes the M&A market as cool, which is more than three timeshigher than just six months ago. The credit crunch hits legal budgets hardestin M&A, corporate transactions, tax and securities.
The report also finds that IP Litigation promises projfectgrowth nearly twice as high as the overall legal market, while biotechnologyventures, pharmaceutical giants and energy conglomerates pave the way.