Description
Why is Litigation Practice Area Going Slow Right Now
[00:00:00] Is litigation a dying practice area in big law because corporate work is so much more profitable?
No. Litigation is not a dying practice area in big law.
It's a great practice area.
Corporate work is profitable when the economy is doing well.
When the economy isn't doing well, corporate work can be very slow. Litigation, I would say is very slow in some markets because there's overcapacity. Meaning, there are too many litigators trying to chase too little work. That creates problems.
Typically, what happens also is that when the economy is strong, a lot of attorneys come out of school and go into corporate, and fewer go to litigation than they do corporate.
Yes, we placed more litigators, but litigation is always active all over the country. The only thing you need to realize, is I don't know what the percentage is, but most attorneys are litigators.
And so it just makes it much harder to get hired by big law firms as a litigator, because there's a lot more competition and you'd have to be much stronger. Typically in the largest law firms, when they're hiring litigators, they're looking for qualifications that you necessarily [00:01:00] need to have if you wanted to work. If there's a corporate attorney like law review or clerkships and things like that. You need to look better on paper many times to get a job as an individual individualan in a large law firm doing litigation.
The other thing with litigation that makes it difficult in law firms is corporate attorneys typically will bring in a lot of work because they're talking to clients about all sorts of things related to those client'sclients' business, all day.
Corporate attorneys take calls from clients all day, whereas litigators are only brought in when there are lawsuits. So if corporate attorneys typically have a lot more work, it's much easier to bring in business.
Corporate attorneys will give litigation work, real estate work, all sorts of different types of work to the litigators. And the litigators will not bring in as much work. And so as a litigator gets more senior, it becomes much more difficult for them to develop clients. And the ones that are typically bringing in the clients are often the corporate attorneys.
Litigation is a very difficult practice area to be senior in. It's also difficult to go in-house because fewer people are going in-house and you have different centers of activity.
[00:02:00] New York has always been a center for corporate work. Most of the law firms in New York are geared towards doing corporate. The same thing goes in the bay area. Most of the law firms in the bay area are geared towards doing mainly corporate as well. A lot of your big markets are very corporate heavy.
Whereas, if you go into Los Angeles, which is a huge market, it's not as corporate heavy. It's main litigation. Same thing in Washington, DC, and a lot of other markets.
When you go into most mid-sized markets, your corporation is not as focused as corporate attorneys in the market. Cincinnati would probably be doing three or four different types of corporate work, and they might even do a little IP in some of the big firms.
It's just not as specialized. And the majority of attorneys are going to be litigators. So court litigation is not dying. It's just very slow right now.
