You know that feeling you get when you return to work after moving house? The warm embrace of ‘business as usual’ after a period of sustained frenetic activity, a little stress, mixed with the excitement that comes with achieving a good outcome for you and your family? Well, I’ve just completed the annual renewal process of professional indemnity insurance (PII) for more than 50 firms in our network, and it’s a similar feeling.

Three cheers! The recession is over, we still live in a United Kingdom, property lawyers are buying Aston Martins again (in London anyway) and the stock market continues its Houdini high-wire act. So why are so many law firm managing partners still feeling a bit glum?

Futurology – the science of predicting the future – is exciting. But peering ahead is a risky business. The futurologist puts his neck on the line and reputations can be lost on what seems like a dead cert prediction.

One of the big changes in legal education recently has been the rise of interest in apprenticeships as a vehicle for developing paralegal and non fee-earning staff within law firms. The drivers for this are partly economic but technological change and a realisation that talented young people were being missed in the quest for graduates have also played a part.

Over the last few years a growing gap has emerged between new school and old school law firms. It’s not as many predicted, in that new firms would emerge and take over the world while long-established firms would fail to respond and disappear. Far from it. Some new firms are struggling to surface above water while a number of traditional firms are finding new ways to reinvent themselves.