Demand: growing, yet fragmenting

“It is not the expansion of business that drives the expectation of increased legal needs, but uncertainty and changes in policy that increase cost and requirements to modify business planning.”

of clients expect their need for legal counsel to increase in the next year

Chambers USA researchers received over 75,000 total responses this year, of which 45,000 in-house respondents offered insight into how they anticipated their need for external legal resources to change over the next year.

Our findings showed that anticipated demand growth remains strong, with almost 2 in 5 respondents indicating they expected their need for external counsel to remain the same.

Whilst impressive, this is significantly lower than last year, where 55% of respondents expected demand to increase.

Private Equity Secondaries (69%)
Private Credit (66%)
Projects (61%)

Employment & Labor (27%)
Securities Regulation (27%)
White-Collar Crime & Investigations (24%)

Strongest sentiment on anticipated demand increases:

Anticipated demand changes fluctuated significantly across practice areas.

Areas in which clients anticipated the greatest demand acceleration and are actively increasing budgets are largely in growth-led spend, notably private capital, and within the energy and infrastructure space.

Conversely, areas which clients highlighted as lower priority areas were in stability-led spend, including regulatory issues and employment. However, regulatory practices have seen high ongoing levels of demand.

Weakest sentiment on anticipated demand increases: