The graphic above tells a simple, painful, and important story about the U.S. legal profession that we can’t afford to ignore.  The graphic compares the receipts of U.S. law firms in 2007 and 2012 based on “class of customer” data from the Economic Census, the U.S. Census Bureau’s official five-year measure of American business.  Although total law firm receipts increased from $225 billion to $246 billion, receipts from individuals declined by almost $7 billion. That’s a staggering sum.

Ordinarily, with such a large and sudden drop (10.2%), I worry about data quality.  Yet, these data appear to be continuations of trend lines that are several decades old.  Further, recent data published by Clio, the cloud-based practice management and time-keeping system used by a large number of solo and small firm lawyers, reveal that the economics of small firm practice are under severe stress.

As a society and a profession, we are heading to a place that none of us wants to go. Our biggest risk factor is failing to acknowledge the full magnitude of the problem.

The two hemispheres of practice

The structural significance of lawyers’ clientele — individuals versus organizations — was first noted by Jack Heinz and Edward Laumann in Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar (1982) (popularly known as Chicago Lawyers I).

Based on a randomized sample of 800 Chicago lawyers, Heinz and Laumann observed that lawyers tend to serve either individuals or organizations, but seldom both.  Further, type of client was strongly correlated with lawyer income, ethnicity, religious background, law school attended, home address, work address, and bar association membership.  “Only in the most formal senses, then, do the two types of lawyers constitute one profession” (p. 384).  This was the basis for their famous two-hemisphere theory of the legal profession. See also Deborah J. Merritt, Two Hemispheres, Law School Cafe, May 2, 2015.

Twenty years later, Heinz, Laumann and other researchers replicated the study based on a sample drawn in 1995.  See Heinz et al., Urban Lawyers: The New Structure of the Bar (2005) (Chicago Lawyers II).  One of their key findings was a dramatic surge of prosperity within the organizational sphere, with real incomes of large firm lawyers and in-house counsel nearly doubling.  Conversely, among solo practitioners, who disproportionately served individual clients, incomes fell from $99,159 (in 1995 dollars) to $55,000. By 1995, 32% of solo practitioners were working a second job compared to only 2% in 1975.

These are startling and sober statistics generated by careful social scientists. These findings are also 23 years old.

From stagnation to decline

The Chicago Lawyers I and II studies reveal stagnation taking hold within the PeopleLaw sector. Yet, more recently, we’ve moved beyond stagnation to a period of actual decline.  I do not use these words lightly. Yet this is the picture that emerges when the graphic above, which reflects U.S. Census Bureau data from 2007 and 2012, is combined with findings from Clio’s 2017 Legal Trends Report.

Clio is a cloud-based practice management and time-keeping system that has obtained enormous traction with solo and small firm lawyers. The 2017 Legal Trends Report is based on anonymized 2016 data from more than 60,000 U.S. timekeepers.

  • The total sample covers 1,026,000 matters, 10,981,000 hours, and $2.6 billion in billings.
  • Approximately 84% of matters are billed by the hour.
  • The average hourly rate for a lawyer is $260.
  • The average matter garnered slightly less than $2,500 in fees, with traffic offenses the lowest average (~$700) and personal injury the highest (~$3,300).

Yet, what is most striking about the Clio Report is that the average lawyer is billing only 2.3 hours per day.  Of that total, 82% is actually invoiced to the client; and only 86% of invoiced fees are collected. This translates into $422/day per lawyer ($260 x 2.6 x 82% x 86%), or $105,000 in gross receipts over a 50-week year. This is a sum that needs to cover office overhead, healthcare, retirement, malpractice insurance, marketing, and taxes, etc.  And note, these are averages, not the bottom decile or quartile. Further, these are lawyers at firms that have invested in practice management software.

Of the remaining 6 hours in the workday, lawyers are spending 48% of their time on administrative tasks (e.g., generating bills, configuring technology, client collections) and 33% on business development.  The report notes that lawyers spend roughly the same amount of time looking for legal work as they do performing legal work (p. 13).

The danger of not saying the obvious

In Post 006, I reported on statistics from The Landscape of Civil Litigation in State Courts report published by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC). The most startling statistic among many is that 76% of cases involve at least one party who is self-represented. The Report frankly states:

The picture of civil litigation that emerges from the Landscape dataset confirms the longstanding criticism that the civil justice system takes too long and costs too much.  As a result, many litigants with meritorious claims and defenses are effectively denied access to justice in state courts because it is not economically feasible to litigate those cases (p. v).

These are not the conclusions of a fringe group. The NCSC’s research agenda is set in collaboration with the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators. This is the body formed at the urging of Chief Justice Warren Burger.

I’ll now state an obvious truth:  Our legal system as it pertains to ordinary people is unraveling.  Hundreds of millions of people can’t afford to hire a lawyer to solve their legal problems. As a result, they go it alone or give up altogether.  In turn, as the PeopleLaw sector shrinks, a large number of lawyers are under tremendous economic stress.  No amount of tinkering at the edges is going to fix or reverse these trends. Instead, we need a series of fundamental redesigns.

This needs to be said clearly and emphatically. This is because the collective and societal solution to the declining PeopleLaw sector is not for lawyers and legal education to pivot toward corporate clients who can still pay the freight, though this is undoubtedly the direction of drift if we fail to forcefully acknowledge the woeful imbalance of our current legal system.

Redesign or failure

As a law professor, I support innovations that make legal problem-solving more cost-effective.  Indeed, that is the purpose of Legal Evolution. See Post 001 (discussing the problem and consequences of lagging legal productivity).  In the segment of the bar that serves corporations, there is tremendous momentum building to make this happen, primarily because corporations feel an urgency to find cost-effective ways to manage the relentless rising tide of legal complexity.  This is what is driving the legal operations movement. Yet, I’m confidence that very few lawyers want to live in a society where corporate efficiency has become our primary goal. There has to be something more.

As Gillian Hadfield wrote in her recent book, Rules for a Flat World (2017), “People who feel as though the rules don’t care about them don’t care about the rules” (p. 79). The withering of the PeopleLaw sector is moving us closer to a place we don’t want to go.  We have entered a period where we are either going to redesign our legal institutions or they will fail. It’s time for lawyers and legal educators to find creative ways to restore the balance. Step one is acknowledging the magnitude of the problem.

What’s next?  See Student Capstone Presentations: Visitors Welcome (038)