Top 10 UK Law Firms Rake In Nearly Half of BigLaw Revenue, Could Gain Even More via Foreign Growth
The top 10 law firms in the United Kingdom bring in almost half of the income earned by the country’s 100 largest legal shops, and could get an even bigger share of the pie through international expansion.
Already, the top 10 bring in around 40 percent of their revenue from foreign legal work, and further expansion beyond the U.K.’s borders “offers an opportunity for revenue growth for firms that have the scale and appetite to compete,” said David Snell in a press release. He is in charge of the London professional partnerships group of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Snell attributed the success of these major firms to their premium pricing and tight control of the partnership structure. In a report released Friday, however, the financial services firm also said that even the elite top 10 are having trouble recovering from the economic crisis that began in 2008, and, taking inflation into account, have seen their profit per partner drop over 20 percent since then, Bloomberg reports. That still leaves the average profit per equity partner at these firms at around 2.5 million pounds.
This year, half of the top 10 are looking ahead to international mergers and acquisitions of other law firms within the next three years, nearly three times as many as the 17 percent who reported such plans in 2011.
