Death, taxes and red tape

Yet more evidence that there’s never been a better time to be a lawyer working in a regulatory field comes from this year’s Client Satisfaction Survey.

The 180-page report, the work of Legal Week’s dedicated research arm Legal Week Intelligence, shows that regulatory and compliance issues top the list of concerns of the UK’s top companies.

No less than 38% of 45 surveyed FTSE 100 clients cited the issue, while it was also highlighted by 36% of the highest-spending clients. The finding is amplified by claims in the report from corporate counsel that levels of regulatory work are rising and set to climb further. Related disciplines like competition are also reported to have sharply risen over the year.

This comes following separate research earlier this year that found financial services and tax partners are charging some of the highest rates in the City, thanks to their highly-specialised skills and high demand. Perhaps disappointingly for traditional litigators hoping for a post-crunch revival in their practice area, not many corporate counsel are yet convinced, at least according to the report.

All in all, the findings suggests that a managing partner hoping to reposition their firm for a more uncertain economy would do well to focus more on regulatory disciplines than on the classic hedges of litigation and insolvency.

Despite hopes from some lawyers, predictions of an upswing in traditional contentious work are so far still an unproven theory (and a theory that failed to really stack up during the last downturn in commercial activity). Certainly, the group-action cheerleading squad and media-friendly US plaintiff lawyers are talking a good game but it seems hard to believe that such areas can generate enough work to reverse the long-term decline in the litigation.

In contrast, betting your investment on regulation and red tape is as close as you can get to a racing certainty. Western governments can’t kick their addiction to introducing new laws and regulations, inevitably generating more work for lawyers. After a decade in which New Labour has comfortably managed 20-odd bills per Queen’s Speech, this trend has substantially underpinned the growth of the UK legal profession.

It is also the strongest reason for scepticism regarding doom-mongering predictions of the commoditisation of law. It does get commoditised, of course, but luckily for lawyers they keep bringing out new stuff.

Red tape has become, like death and taxes, a certainty of life, far more reliable than predicting which way the global economy will go. There will, most likely, be some kind of contentious upturn - but it won’t look like they used to.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com