The PwC Law firms survey 2021 – what lies ahead for legal?
In its most recent annual law firms survey, ‘Facing the future with confidence’, PwC points us at several ways that law firms are (or should be) responding to the pandemic landscape, learning some lessons and preparing themselves for the future.
The first thing to note is how dramatically firms were wrong when predicting their own likely performance this year. Even after six months of pandemic, firms thought they would be facing a profit drop of up to 20%, but we can see they have in fact seen striking profit growth as legal services were in demand and several categories of costs fell away. Firms will have confidence to build on this success, and as international offices drove much of this growth, we may expect to see ambitious firms continuing to invest here.
In terms of office space and hybrid working – which is on everyone’s minds now – 48% of respondents expect their firms to reduce their office footprint, but critically keep the environment for true face time – with the main reasons said to be collaboration, team bonding and relationship building, client interaction and coaching/learning/development. Interestingly, firms said productivity and innovation were not priorities for office work. We’ve all lived through a lot of change now. However, with a world of billable hours and very long days in an office being the norm not so long ago, this is still a surprising early indicator of how different the world of law might look in the future.
Finally, quite an alarming point – cybersecurity in such a world. A full 90% of respondents to PwC’s questions say they are concerned about the impact of cyber risks, and with good reason. Three-quarters say their firms have suffered an incident due to the unintentional actions of staff members. Even given the risks that surround moving so many people into regular remote working mode, this is a scarily high number. Firms are aware of this, with their priorities for the year ahead showing a shift from ‘reduce cost’ to ‘reduce cyber risk’.
