Chicago. Photo: Antwon McMullen/Shutterstock.com

Chicago may be the biggest economic engine of the Midwest, but law firms headquartered elsewhere in the region saw stronger revenue and demand growth in 2019, according to data compiled by Citi Private Bank's law firm lending and consulting unit.

Meanwhile, a recent boom in Midwest merger activity has also largely bypassed the Windy City so far.

Chicago-based law firms saw their revenue grow by 4.5%, trailing the 2019 industry average of 5.3%. Of all 11 regions Citi tracks, Chicago came in eighth place for revenue growth, said Gretta Rusanow, head of advisory services for Citi's Law Firm Group.

"They're sitting in the middle," Rusanow said about Chicago-based law firms. And that middling performance extends to the growth in demand and inventory Chicago firms saw, at 0.2% and 6.6%, respectively. "They're firmly in the middle of the pack."

Chicago law firms lagged most when it came to rate increases, Rusanow said. The firms Citi surveyed across the country reported raising rates by 4.5%, which Rusanow called the "strongest we have seen since 2008." Midwestern law firms increased their rates by 4.2%, but Chicago firms increased their rates by 3.7%. That's the second-lowest increase Citi saw in 2019.

These numbers come as the legal industry moves on from 2019, which saw modest growth compared to the gangbusters year that was 2018. That was the takeaway from both Citi and Wells Fargo Private Bank Legal Specialty Group

"It got better as the year went on. [2019] started fairly slow," said Bob Tolan, senior director of banking for Wells Fargo Private Bank Legal Specialty Group, speaking about the nationwide results. "If you think about the beginning of 2019, and how prominent the looming recession talks were and the pace of things, you put that together and look at where the year ended up, it's a pretty strong turnaround, a pretty remarkable performance given where things started."

Tolan echoed Rusanow's sentiments in describing where law firms headquartered in Chicago and the Midwest fell in terms of the rest of the legal industry: "They're in the middle of the pack."

Midwestern law firms overall did much better in 2019. They saw their revenue and demand grow by 7% and 2.8%, both of which eclipsed the nationwide averages law firms put up in 2019, Rusanow said. These firms also saw their inventory—which accounts for both unpaid legal bills and unbilled legal hours—grow by 6.9%, a slight drop from the industrywide average of 7.1%

The legal industry at large is seeing its collection cycle lengthen as clients take longer to pay their bills, Rusanow and Tolan said. That trend was on display in Chicago in 2019, where law firms reported their collection cycles increasing by 2.1%, eclipsing the national average of 1.8%, Citi found.

But Midwestern law firms bucked against that trend last year—their collection cycle decreased slightly by 0.1%, Rusanow said.

A longer collection cycle hampered revenue growth in 2019, Citi found, but neither Rusanow or Tolan seemed to be sounding the alarm about the growth in unpaid bills law firms are sitting on. Rusanow said it could be a matter of timing: "There might not have been enough time to convert that into revenue."

Tolan said one source of the collections delays is the e-billing systems the firms' large corporate clients have been using, a point Rusanow has made previously. Those systems will flag certain bills for various reasons and send them back to the law firms.

"All of those things together, it's not a huge negative, but if clients are paying slower, that's going to impact cash flow and profitability," Tolan said.

One area where Chicago law firms bested their Midwestern counterparts was expense growth, 4.8% vs. 7.7%, respectively, Rusanow said.

2019 was also the year of the Midwest in terms of mergers, and that was true for the upper Midwest market of Minneapolis in particular. Three large mergers centered around Minneapolis-based law firms: Faegre Baker Daniels with Philadelphia's Drinker Biddle & Reath; Gray Plant Mooty with Kansas City's Lathrop Gage; and Briggs and Morgan with Cincinnati's Taft Stettinius & Hollister.

Meanwhile, Dentons launched its so-called "Golden Spike" strategy by combining with Indianapolis-based Bingham Greenebaum Doll and Pittsburgh's Cohen & Grigsby.

Although Citi does not take merging or recently merged law firms into account when making its calculations, Rusanow said 2019′s numbers could mean more law firm consolidation among Am Law 100 and 200 firms. Forty-four percent of the firms Citi surveyed in the Second Hundred reported a drop in demand, she said.

"If that's a one-year result, that's one thing. If that becomes a multiyear trend, we would expect to see further consolidation among firms in the Second Hundred, the more regional firms," Rusanow said.