Hours are flat, but client spending is up for both partners and associates. Clients have increased the amount of work they’re giving to Am Law 200 firms. And lawyers who are paid at least $800 per hour now account for an increasing cut of the U.S. legal market. These are the top-line results of an analysis of a remarkable data run from TyMetrix, the Hartford-based electronic billing giant. It permits us to gauge demand for legal services on the basis of what clients are actually buying rather than from reports of law firm billing activity or financial results. Those reports, which The American Lawyer, Citibank, Wells Fargo, and Thomson Peer Monitor regularly publish, are of course valuable, but not the last word on the state of demand for lawyers.
I asked TyMetrix’s staff for help in discerning demand for high-end legal services. To meet that request, they went into their LegalVIEW database and isolated 37 substantial companies (eight Fortune 100, eight Fortune 101500, and 21 others) for which they had consistent billing data from 2008 through the middle of 2012. Collectively these clients purchased $7 billion in legal services from 4,762 law firms, including 180 of The Am Law 200 over that time period. TyMetrix provided hours and fee data by quarter. The quarterly fees ranged from a low of $208 to a high of $68,336,309. The data went far beyond the rarefied $800-an-hour lawyer.
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