Many mouths to feed
Jinfo Blog

9th October 2008

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Events have moved so fast in recent weeks – days even – that you have to wonder where this leaves IRN’s recent report on the UK legal services market. Based on 2007 survey data, it nevertheless comes up with what seems like a sensible verdict for these troubled times: a slowdown in revenue growth in the short-term followed by new ways of working, competition and consolidation in a liberalised market. Many of the larger firms are increasingly looking to overseas markets to boost revenues as UK revenue growth slows, the £350 report http://digbig.com/4xqqm finds. ‘The Legal Services Act 2007 will provide the framework for significant changes in the industry in the next few years and these changes will include opportunities for outside investment in law firms, and the likelihood of the emergence of national legal brands,’ it continues. These small rays of hope in an otherwise pretty bleak landscape are also reflected in an article in The American Lawyer http://digbig.com/4xqqk in which Richard Lloyd suggests that, entering this downturn, UK law firms are ‘in their strongest position since the nineties’. But it also supports the IRN finding that this resilience is largely based on their overseas business. ‘The UK firms now have widespread international networks that are very successful,’ Lloyd says. ‘But the downside for them is that they still have a huge number of mouths to feed in London.’ So where does this leave worried UK legal information professionals? Should they simply acknowledge that it may be their colleagues in central and eastern Europe, the Middle East and Asia who have any hope for the immediate future? Or should they be more upbeat, making clear to management that, although their firms’ core operations may require local legal expertise, support services such as research and intelligence can be located wherever the information management talent can be found – and that talent is predominantly located in London? In a recent feature I did for Information World Review http://digbig.com/4xqqn the legal information professionals I talked to said that they were going to have to take tough decisions on costs if they were to stay in business within their firms. But one supplier took a much more upbeat view. ‘As customers experience our new or improved products… we are finding that the cost of the products and services they regard as fundamental to their business is less of a talking point,’ Simon Drane of LexisNexis told me. Now the sensible reaction to a remark like that may be: Well he would say that, wouldn’t he? But it strikes me that, for information professionals to convince their employers that they too are ‘fundamental to their business’, a little bit of LexisNexis style chutzpah probably wouldn’t come amiss.

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