You can read the full report here and I'll give some highlights and thoughts on the stuff I thought was most interesting.

Some quick background: Clio is practice management software. They're pretty popular. And because they're popular they have huge swaths of data about the legal industry. They aggregate it and put out a legal trend report. This is probably mostly interesting to attorneys but if you're a consumer of legal services I could see this being good contextual info.

• Despite the general economy having a bad time the demand for legal services has rebounded from the covid dip. Firms are opening a lot of new matters and in March 2022, new casework spiked to 24%.

• I was mostly interested in how inflation affected legal services and Clio had that data. Law firms aren't raising their rates to match the inflation rate. This kind of tracks my anec-data. Myself and the other attorneys/firms I know haven't raised rates to adjust for the inflation rate. The legal industry is complimentary to other industries though. When there's economic contraction, like in 2008, it's not like firms had to basically contract with the rest of the economy as companies did things like switch things in-house or opted to gut legal budget. If firms happen to have higher overhead it's hard to pass that on to a client that's also facing a contraction. So if a firm mostly serves tech clients, and tech is constricting, it's not super easy to turn around and be like, "yo, my favorite tech-bros with mass layoffs and hiring freezes, our rates are up because gas is more expensive. HAVE YOU SEE THE COST OF EGGS?! Alright, dope. Keep your demand the same and pay our higher rates please."

• There's a rise in firms that are digital or hybrid between digital and office space. Which should be expected. Attorneys seem to want the flexibility to work from wherever. Which also stacks with my experience. If I'm stuck in an airport with nothing to do there's no reason I shouldn't have full access to the stuff I need to do some work if I want. Or work from the beach or whatever.

Those are the standout things to me from the report. If there's anything that sticks out to you or you want to add your insight to the inflation stuff I'd appreciate it and I puzzle where my law practice fits into the big legal industry puzzle.

Also I did an AMA a couple days ago while I was at ClioCon in Nashville which was super fun. And I want to say thank to all you for asking me questions and stuff!

I also ran into Alex Su while I was there which was super fun because I think his videos are funny. And it turns out he's a pretty insightful dude chatting with him a bit with an interesting career path from law school to legal tech.