Trends across the Litigation legal market

Market research and client feedback has shown that, with the vaccination campaign underway and, hopefully, a path out of the COVID-19 pandemic emerging, litigators who spoke with us told us that they were extremely grateful to be back before the courts and are seeing a steadily increasing resumption of in-person proceedings.

However, there has been close to universal acknowledgment that serious steps need to be taken to address docket backlogs. Trial lawyers express hope that some modernisations will remain, allowing more routine proceedings to be carried out remotely, but that is still to be seen. What everyone wants to avoid is significantly differing standards by each court, which all agree can lead to a real quagmire. 

On the regulatory side, a full year of the Biden Administration has seen the expected increase in enforcement. White-collar litigators note that aggressive antitrust enforcement will be worth watching in particular, given appointments at the Antitrust division of the DOJ and at the FTC.

As mentioned before, lawyers who we spoke to during our research into the Chambers USA 2022 guide told us that they are awaiting the effects of more scrutiny by the SEC into the operation of SPACs, which has already partly led to a slowdown in that market.

Many large commercial litigation practices report that plaintiff firms are more sophisticated and are beginning to see the fruits of litigation funding. This has not quite exploded into a barrage of claims against the big corporates, but it is an area we are watching closely, and our plaintiff coverage in the Chambers USA guide continues to grow and expand as firms begin to develop more sophisticated plaintiff-side practices.

In fact, the Chambers USA legal rankings have almost tripled the number of plaintiff-side attorneys that are recognized over the past 5 years, so it is an area of interest for the team to continue researching and analysing for future editions of the guide.  

Finally, attorneys are increasingly watching potential trends around False Claims Act and government interventions there, with some notable developments on the intersection of cyber security and the FCA. To discover which firms and lawyers are ranked at a Nationwide level for False Claims Act please click here.

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