Study: Law Firms Going The Way Of The Kodak Camera

An in-depth study of the legal market concludes that most law firms are falling prey to avoidance and wishful thinking and are at risk of obsolescence. The “2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market,” a project of The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession at the Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor, begins by looking at the late history of the Kodak company. In 1977, it almost totally controlled the U.S. market for film and had 85 percent of the market for cameras. Also in the mid-70s, a Kodak engineer devised and, with a colleague, essentially built the first digital camera. The company wasn’t interested. “They were convinced,” he later said, “that no one would ever want to look at their pictures on a television set.” By the time the company figured out the market, it was too late. With that tale as a kind of model, the Georgetown-Thomson Reuters study examines major changes in the legal marketplace since 2008, including the increasing demand by corporate clients for greater efficiency and transparency and the decreasing proportion of their overall legal spend that they allocate to law firms. The study outlines basic changes that law firms would need to make in order to address this scenario, but finds  most are not doing it. “Like Kodak,” it concludes, “they have been locked in a kind of denial driven inertia, a belief that somehow the model that brought them past success will see them through now as well.”