Is there doom & gloom around the corner?

Everyone is obviously concerned about what's around the corner given recent financial upheavals.  Nobody knows if we are going to have a deep recession or of it will be just a blip.  It is hard to see if there is just a lack confidence or if they is going to be a very real lack of money to drive growth & development.

What we can do is comment on now and our observations of current state of play are positive:

·          Law firms have been busy.  Since May, we have posted our best revenue figures for 3 years.  There is a lot of activity being generated for the legal profession by recent events; we can’t say how they see things panning out once this work is finished but our forecasted figures into January are in line with the positive trend since May.

·          After discussion with many of the top 100 IT Directors, it is clear that many firms (including US firms who one might expect to be battening down the hatches) are committed to spending on major projects for at least the next 18 months which will ensure a fair amount of recruitment activity. 

So we would expect the Legal IT Contractor market to be fairly healthy going forward and we are still maintaining the highest number of contractors we have ever had in Legal.

·          Only 3 of our clients have frozen recruitment those particular firms would be expected to do so anyway (after recently completing a long run of large implementations).

·          We have seen a reduction in new permanent positions by 18% but we would expect a 10% drop around this time of year anyway.