Law firm surveys - Press room

PwC selected Redwood, the first company to introduce an automated benchmarking program for the legal industry, because of its knowledge in business intelligence and technical knowledge of the legal market. As a result of this alliance, PwC will increase its existing participation base, utilize a more efficient data collection process and provide more comprehensive performance indicators to its clients.

"Our goal was to make the survey response process easier, more efficient and more objective," said Laurie Lieb, director of the law firm survey group.

"We recognized Redwood Analytics as a market leader, not just technologically, but also in sharing our commitment to customer service and excellence. We view our use of Redwood’s technology as an important step in maintaining our leadership role in providing valuable and timely law firm performance statistics," commented David Zimmerman, partner-in-charge of the PwC law firm survey group.

"This alliance continues Redwood’s commitment to the legal industry to support better decision making through the efficient use of technology," stated Norm Mullock, chief strategy officer at Redwood. "Now, participants in both Redwood benchmarking and in PwC’s LFSS and Brass^plus surveys will benefit from leading, complementary performance metrics driven by the same technology platform to understand firm performance versus peers. Increased information ought not to require increased effort on the part of our customers," said Mr. Mullock.

The survey measures more than 60 different areas of law firm activities and examines key challenges affecting the way global law firms do business including:

• Strategies for global expansion
• Allocating global resources
• Criteria for entering and exiting markets
• Trends in human Resources
• Growth expectations, and profitability

Participants include leading firms in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, Australia, Asia and Latin America.

"At a time of rapid evolution of the worldwide legal marketplace, this survey will provide participants with critical information and benchmarking data on strategic growth and profitability," said Stanley Kolodziejczak, co-chair of the Law Firm Services group. "The strategic survey is the first of its kind, providing a level of business and competitive intelligence previously unavailable to the market."

The survey results help firms evaluate where they stand in relation to their peers and how they can strategically move forward to meet their goals and deal with competition. It includes questions on staffing, laterals, mergers, billing, profitability, risks and operating results, as well as reports on individual countries. It also has an extensive section on the planning process and business development approaches for new offices and expansion of existing offices.

In addition to the global report and analysis, participants can receive reports in segments, creating custom comparison groups by peer firms or specific geographic locations.

"PwC has nearly 100 years of experience servicing law firms and 50 years of providing critical benchmarking information to the legal profession using its extensive market knowledge. We spent a year designing the questions and refining the methodology with feedback from major firms," said Kolodziejczak.

The topic of our presentation was Understanding the importance and power of legal surveys. A copy of the presentation delivered by our law firm survey team is available for download.

Download Understanding the importance and power of legal surveys (465kb)