Credit: ALM Productivity Is Up. But Expecting It to Continue May Be a 'Tenuous Proposition'
Some observers question the value of the metric, as AI threatens to transform the profession and hefty billing rate growth plays an outsized role in firm profits.
August 12, 2024 at 10:00 AM
5 minute read
The original version of this story was published on The American Lawyer
What You Need to Know
- A report this week tallied a 0.4% increase in productivity during Q2, after recording a 0.5% drop during Q1. It also found that 54% of firms had lawyers billing more hours relative to Q2 2023.
- The long-term trend has been toward mitigating productivity losses, and even with very strong fundamentals, the productivity boost was only modest.
- 'If we see a softening in countercyclical demand, if corporate work starts to cool off, that could reverse very quickly,' one analyst said, referring to the productivity increase.
Amid an overall decline that spans roughly a decade and a half, plus waning influence during an era of record-high billing rates and generative artificial intelligence adoption, productivity across the legal industry actually rose during the second quarter of the year.
The measure of demand hours divided by head count at firms increased for the first time since the transactional boom in 2021, according to a report this week, and more than half of firms had lawyers billing more hours compared with 2023′s second quarter.
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