In the last Law Firm Disrupted of the decade, we make a pitch for your help on the question of legal analytics and look at the biggest law firm merger of 2019, finalized in the last weeks of the year. Want to weigh in? Email me here. Want this dispatch in your inbox every Thursday? Sign up here.

A Little Help, Please?

We'll start out this week with an appeal for holiday giving. Specifically, my colleagues over at ALM Intelligence are eager for insights about how you're using legal analytics. And, as an incentive, they'll send participants a copy of the results of their survey. Follow this link to weigh in.

I looked back at last year's report to help make a case for why this research is valuable—both for law firms trying to understand their own data, and for our macro-project of tracking innovation in the profession. Maybe it's obvious, but if not, this line sums it up:

Data's omnipresence in the digital economy has set the stage for law firms to move beyond drawing conclusions in an ad-hoc manner on the basis of an individual's intuition alone.

There's also a useful distinction between two broad "sub-domains" of legal analytics: the practice of law and the business of law. Within the former category, the transformative effects on litigation have been stronger to date, but applications for the transactional side are growing.

A story I did last week on marketing and business development efforts within firms offers a window into the business-of-law side. Marketing and business development leaders are increasingly recognizing that their priority needs to be leveraging data to identify business opportunities, Meghan Frank of LexisNexis told me. One sign of this is a finding that 70% of respondents pointed to successful collaboration between IT and marketing departments.

So, please take a moment to share what your organization makes of the turn towards big data. Thanks!

Buzzer Beater

What's bound to be one of the last mergers of 2019 is also the biggest. The tie-up between Minneapolis-based Faegre Baker Daniels and Philadelphia-based Drinker Biddle & Reath, announced Wednesday, marks the only merger in the calendar year involving two firms each with 200 or more lawyers. And it's only the fifth of the year involving two firms with over 100 lawyers, according to data from Altman Weil's Merger Line. (Another potential big merger, between Troutman Sanders and Pepper Hamilton, so far hasn't been sealed.) That's a slight dip from 2018, when six deals featured firms both boasting head counts in the triple figures. Half of those were combinations between 200+ lawyer firms, highlighted by the transatlantic tie up between Bryan Cave and Berwin Leighton Paisner. For a while, it seemed increasingly possible that O'Melveny & Myers and Allen & Overy would join the club, but both firms pulled the plug after 18 months of talks at the beginning of September.

Hildebrandt Consulting founder Brad Hildebrandt told me a couple of weeks ago that the recent slowdown in significant mergers is just an indication of the cyclical nature of the business: the fever for combinations in 2017 and 2018 couldn't continue forever. These big transactions are hard to pull off, he acknowledged, with conflicts emerging from seemingly every corner.

But the pressures on midsized firms—associate salaries, cybersecurity and technology—particularly in competitive cities, aren't going anywhere, even if the strong performance for the legal industry as a whole over the past two years may have allowed leaders to paper over some fundamental issues.

As we look forward to 2020, I'll certainly be keeping my eyes on what the pace of merger activity looks like. And connected to that, what's going to be the next step in Dentons' bid to conquer the U.S. market? Stay tuned.

In the News

➤➤ Does administering psychological assessments to would-be attorneys qualify as an expanded use of legal analytics? My colleague Dylan Jackson reported on Thompson Hine's policy of asking both potential associates and laterals to take psychologist Raymond Cattell's 16 Personality Factor test, which certainly increases the data the firm has at its disposal. These results get measured against data aggregated from the firm's most successful partners, who also sat for the evaluation. In the end, the data isn't used as a sifting tool, but instead to guide one-on-one interviews. The algorithm isn't in control. Yet.

➤➤ The folks over at Above The Law work hard at staying on top of every minute development in associate bonus season, thanks to a network of tipsters that are happy to keep the rest of the legal world in the know. I don't pay as much attention to the bonus wars, and yet I was intrigued by Joe Patrice's report on discontent at Kirkland & Ellis—where the black box compensation model keeps us in the media dependent on these tips. The impression from the inside is the firm is regressing on compensation while it continues to surge in revenue.

➤➤ Finally, as I mentioned earlier, this will be the last Law Firm Disrupted of the year. I'll be out of the office next week, spending some time with my family. I'm well aware it can be harder to draw those hard and fast delineations between work and, well, everything else, in the law business, but attorney and mental health advocate Patrick Krill argues that it's essential in the long run.

Anyway, it's been a blast writing this briefing since I took over in May, and thanks to all of you who take the time to read it every week. Have a wonderful holiday season, and I'll be back in your inboxes in two weeks. See you in 2019!