It is encouraging to see a number of recent surveys showing conveyancer and consumer confidence both on the up and higher than last year, as this suggests that business and personal prospects are improving. However, the government may well be playing Scrooge this year as the austerity plans for 2016 are the equivalent of taking out 0.5% GDP growth per quarter and its much trumpeted stamp duty reforms appear to have killed off transactions at the top end of the market.

Ever since the legislators introduced the Access to Justice Act in 2000, claimant personal injury law firms have taken a whipping of some sort; from insurers blaming them for escalating car insurance costs to the media berating the sector for the UK’s perceived claims culture. Then in 2013, LASPO was introduced and in 2015 when it really started to bite, impacting work streams and revenues, George Osborne stuck the knife in yet again with the Autumn Statement.

So, as if there wasn’t enough going on, the Competition and Markets Authority unexpectedly weighed in this week with its study into the supply of legal services to consumers and SMEs. This will be widely derided in the profession as more unwarranted interference from those outside the law (ie, they don’t know what they’re doing). Certainly, there does seem to be an unprecedented anti-lawyer narrative emerging.

Cybersecurity, agility and digitisation of the courts will be the top IT concerns for law firms in 2016, according to a number of our law firm clients. We’ve seen cybercrime impact organisations as never before, so it’s critical that firms have plans in place to protect data, systems and client information. Who would have thought that a 15-year old could hack into a telecommunications company or that we would hear about less-than-sophisticated scams targeting firm and client bank accounts via emailed links?

It has become a commonplace – I have bowed to convention and endorsed the notion myself – to observe that law firms are labour-, not capital-, intensive, and that (here’s the dangerous and subtle segue) therefore there would be no benefit to them in taking on outside investors, much less going public. This is often combined, at least by the more nuanced, with a brief observation on the perils of law firms’ taking on a material amount, or any amount, of debt. But what if the conventional wisdom is mistaken?