Responding to Growth Pressures: Best Practices for Evaluating Merger

Responding to Growth Pressures: Best Practices for Evaluating Merger

Law firms are facing intensifying growth pressure. Competitive and client forces have pushed law firms to not only focus on increasing revenue and profitability, but perhaps more importantly, to add practice depth, practice breadth, overall scale, and geographic reach. Significant investments in lateral hiring and law firm combinations have changed the competitive landscape by forming new, dominant firms in particular practice areas, industries, and geographic regions. This has reshaped the AmLaw 200, with an increasing number of firms now offering considerable scale and reach compared to existing competitors, regionally, nationally, and internationally. This evolution has created new choices for clients seeking advisors who can provide services across multiple jurisdictions or offer superior depth in particular practices and industries, further fueling the race for market share and the pressure on law firms to grow.