Green Shoots
It’s a rather tired metaphor I’m afraid, but I’m beginning to wonder …..!
Recently a couple of things have made me think that we may come out of this quicker than I originally though – one anecdotal, the other based on hard data.
As part of my job I speak to lots of lawyers (lucky me!) Mostly Cashroom clients and potential clients, but not solely. The number of people who are more positive than negative is increasing.
Now that in and of itself is hardly surprising. March and April were pretty bleak, and it doesn’t take much to get better than that. But I think it’s more than that – most people I speak with are reporting a significant up-tick in business activity.
We track client activity through our web portal. We base it on the number of client account payments instructed by our clients.
Here’s an interesting graph:
You can see that, while not returned to pre lockdown levels, its moving in the right direction.
It’s clearly too soon to get excited but, at least for our clients, things are starting to get busier.
I also wanted to mention 2 areas where our clients have seen little or no drop in business activity, and indeed some have seen significant growth.
Family Law, and Wills and Probate/Executries. It seems lockdown is operating like Christmas in spring, and exposing the cracks in relationships where parties are forced to spend time together, and sadly with more than 50,000 “excess deaths”, the latter is to be expected.
Hardly surprising I suppose, but it is an interesting counter to those who might recommend super specialised “boutique” law firms. It seems a broad base of work does indeed protect against economic downturn.
But along with these green shoots, comes some really interesting innovation.
I recently received a call from a former client. We hadn’t spoken for a while, but, a serial entrepreneur, he wanted to chat about his new business. A very interesting platform for private client lawyers dealing with the complexity of probate and executries.
