Last week we discussed the emergence of alternative legal service providers and their impact on law firms in the years since the 2008 economic downturn. Firms and lawyers who have succeeded in this time period, particularly in non-litigation, transactional and patent law practices have found ways to work within the framework of their corporate clients. It makes sense to look at trends in the legal market from the perspective of general counsel, which according to ALM Intelligence:

If you haven’t heard, the 2020 Report on the State of the Legal Market published by The Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center and Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, states that “Fundamental Shifts Are Disrupting the Legal Market.” It’s the title, as a matter of fact, and every legal publication in existence has published an article about the report with effectively the same title.

The "fundamental shift"...