This year’s LexisNexis Bellwether report reveals a sector that sees itself as a customer service success story but faces challenges around efficiency and recruitment. The Brief takes a closer look.
Every year the legal industry information provider LexisNexis produces its Bellwether report, taking the temperature of smaller and medium-sized UK law firms.
Its headline findings this year included that a large majority of firms were confident in the service they provided to clients, and in their relationships with them, but that they also felt pressures around efficiency, focus and profitability.
Satisfaction guaranteed
When it came to customer service, a huge 84% of respondents rated their client experience as “good” or “excellent”, with just 1% saying it was “poor”.
Charles Metherell, CEO of the family law specialist National Legal Service, says, “The 84% client satisfaction figure is encouraging, but I suspect it reflects how law firms measure satisfaction rather than the full picture.
“Clients who had a poor experience rarely return to tell you about it.”
However, Stacey Mabrouk, commercial director at the criminal defence firm Olliers Solicitors, says, “While an 84% positive client experience rating across the SME market might raise eyebrows about industry self-deception, our approach to client care suggests it is achievable.
“We repeatedly receive amazing feedback on the care we show Olliers’ clients both directly and through online reviews. But we don't take it for granted.
“We formalised our client care standards just last September when we launched the Olliers Client Care Accreditation exam. Every team member underwent 12 hours of training before sitting a two-part exam to become officially accredited in their ability to deliver exceptional client care.”
While an 84% positive client experience rating across the SME market might raise eyebrows about industry self-deception, our approach to client care suggests it is achievable.
Encouragingly, just 13% of respondents said retaining clients was a challenge, and none reported that client retention or lack of repeat work were holding their firms back.
Upward growth trajectory
Meanwhile 62% of firms reported they had grown compared with three or four years ago – a four-percentage-point increase on the 58% who gave the same answer to this question back in 2025 and a big improvement on the 48% who responded positively back in 2024.
Growth was spread broadly across practice areas, led by employment and commercial and corporate firms. Profitability, however, was reported to be concentrated in higher-value dispute resolution and private client work.
Among the factors acting as a drag on growth and profitability, administrative tasks (52%), case management and document drafting and review (28%) were the most commonly cited.
Can’t get the staff
Attracting and retaining talent, meanwhile, was mentioned as a constraint on growth by 27% of respondents – up from 20% last year. That’s an increase of more than a third.
Metherall says the talent finding resonated with his firm. “We have seen that constraint tighten in real time, particularly for solicitors willing to work in Legal Aid,” he explains.
“The jump from 20% to 27% of firms citing recruitment and retention as a challenge understates the pressure in publicly funded work, where salary competition from commercial firms makes attraction genuinely difficult.”
AI-fuelled growth plans
To address these challenges, firms said they would increase the use of AI over the coming 12-18 months. Forty-one per cent planned to increase its deployment in research, drafting and review, and 40% in standardising documents and workflows.
Despite the pressures they cited, 67% of firms said they planned to grow organically, down from 72% last year, with 8% saying they would consider engaging in mergers and acquisitions – up from 5% last year but still down on the 10% figure recorded in 2024 and 13% in 2023.
Elephant in the room
One elephant in the legal room not mentioned it this year’s Bellwether report is the increasing interest in the sector from private equity.
The omission of private equity from the report is notable. It is reshaping conversations across the sector, even in Legal Aid.
It could be argued that most respondents would be too small to be of interest to investors seeing new opportunities after picking off all the low-hanging fruit in the accountancy sector, but The Brief’s recent conversations with leaders of law firms of all sizes point to private equity’s influence across the market stretching far beyond those firms that might constitute its first round of suitable investments.
As Metherell says, “The omission of private equity from the report is notable. It is reshaping conversations across the sector, even in Legal Aid, where consolidation through PE-backed vehicles is increasingly part of the landscape.”
Overall this year’s report reveals a sector that feels it is getting things right when it comes to the human side of legal practice but is still getting to grips with the impact of rapid technological and economic change.
By the time next year’s report is published we can expect to have seen private equity’s influence in the sector become more prevalent still. It will, if anything, be even more interesting than this one.
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- Connect with Stacey Mabrouk via LinkedIn
- Connect with Charles Metherell via LinkedIn
