Biglaw Billing News Spells Opportunity for Others
Corporate clients have been unenthusiastic on the topic of the $180,000 first-year lawyer, as well as the idea of big-name lawyers charging their clients $2,000 per hour, reports Above the Law. But this environment could present opportunity for competition from non-mega firms.
The site tells how the global general counsel for Bank of America let the nation’s largest law firms know that he doesn’t intend to absorb the cost of the salary increase. “While we respect the firms’ judgment about what best serves their long-term competitive interests,” he wrote in an email that has become public, “we are aware of no market-driven basis for such an increase and do not expect to bear the costs of the firms’ decisions.”
But there’s an opportunity here for firms that don’t appear on the top 100 lists, writes . “With the many tools available today, smaller providers of legal services have the capacity to present (in both appearance and reality) truly viable alternatives to their elite competition. This is true both for individual lawyers and for law firms as a whole,” he writes.
