EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE? - Law firm leaders love to say that their organizations are not out to be “all things to all people.” But for the Big Four, that’s kinda the point. Take EY for example. As the company plans for a split with its audit business, its global law leader, Cornelius Grossmann, has plans of his own to make the new-look company take the legal services market by storm. As Law.com’s Bruce Love reports, Grossmann said during a recent Law.com webinar that a new EY company, split from its audit business, would focus on largescale clients and projects that are multidisciplinary in nature, with legal services being a key—but not dominant—component. Such projects may have a management consulting component, a technology component, or a tax component. They may concern a business transaction like M&A, or a business process transformation element. But the one thing they will have in common will be that they will be led by the client’s business need, where often legal is only a composite part. “The biggest difference in working in [the EY] environment, from a client delivery perspective, is that you need to adopt the mindset of a multidisciplinary practice, where [lawyers are] a team member, not the decision taker,” Grossmann said, adding that while law is “super important” and will “not be overruled,” there are “so many other aspects” to client problems.
KEEP MOVING - Just when you thought it was safe to resume treating everyone like dirt because they had no place else to go… Even though law firm demand has slipped and associate lateral movement is slowing down, the number of partner laterals actually increased again in 2022, according to new industry data. Partner moves in the Southeast, and in litigation, intellectual property and banking & finance practices have been especially pronounced, analysts at investigative intelligence firm Decipher said in a new report, adding that if “2021 was bonkers, 2022 is even crazier” on the lateral movement front. “What we’re seeing, both compared to last year and compared to 2019 … current partner hiring levels are above all of those benchmarks,” Mike Ellenhorn, founder and CEO of Decipher, told Law.com’s Andrew Maloney. “So what does that tell us? It tells us that firms are still pursuing scale, still pursuing market share. They are continuing to focus, at least amongst the large law firm segments, on market consolidation.”
