The LexisNexis GLP Index

Is demand for your practice area of the law growing or declining?

The LexisNexis GLP Index pulls together the latest data to provide some powerful growth predictions across the legal profession.

The legal sector in 2023

Demand for legal expertise is predicted to grow by 6% in 2023 overall when compared to 2022.

It's not quite the message you'd expect to hear when looking at the UK's current economic and political landscape. In the last 12 months alone we've seen three Prime Ministers occupy Downing Street, the outbreak of war in Europe, and the "cost of living" crisis all have a profound impact on business as usual.

Yet, the legal sector has proven its resilience once again. While business is by no means booming, legal sector revenues are continuing to steadily climb.

This year the GLP Index predicts competition law and risk and compliance law to make the most ground, and immigration and property law to make noticeable rebounds. Other practice areas, however, aren't likely to be as lucky.

We hope this in-depth report adds value in your planning for 2023 and beyond.

Dylan Brown
Content Lead, LexisNexis

Demand for legal expertise is predicted to grow by +6% in 2023

Click on your practice area for growth predictions

Our methodology

The GLP model seeks to measure legal services demand via two sets of data:

• Direct metrics - data that measures legal activity directly (i.e. number of residential property transactions completed – each of which directly correlates with legal activity)
• Indirect proxies - underlying data that measures the factors that drive demand for legal services (i.e. number of new housing starts – which do not necessarily directly drive legal activity itself, but are a good proxy for the health of the sector).

Our research team considered almost 300 different datapoints to reach a representative basket of 10-20 metrics which are accurate proxies for legal services demand in 12 key areas of practice.

Selected for their proximity to real legal work, the quality (accuracy, reliability and frequency of update) of data source and their forward-looking predictive power.

Every metric was then weighted using recommendations from LexisNexis legal experts - High/Medium/Low (or Null) for its relevance to different areas of the legal market.

Combined, this gives a weighted average growth rate for the practice area for each market segment. Different practice areas are summed in proportion to their size or importance within each market segment.

This is based on our best estimates driven by real data:

• # of practitioners by area of practice (Small and Mid Law, from LexisNexis research)
• # of partners by Practice Area (Large Law)
• LexisNexis product usage levels by Practice Area (Corporate)

The weighted average creates an overall estimate for legal services demand for each market sector. This has been indexed from the start of 2017 to show total growth over the past few years and provide a baseline to track COVID-19 impact.