The Tea: Why are Canadian Firms Afraid of Data?
I dug into some data that is available and the results surprised me. We are doing pretty damn well!
As an occasionally retired competitive softball player and significant baseball fan, I love data and statistics. For those who keep close tabs on the Canadian legal market, there is a shocking lack of data available - especially when compared with our neighbouring firms in the United States and our legal cousins in the United Kingdom.
In the United States, law firms voluntarily disclose what (to Canadians) would be a shocking amount of information about their firms including financial information. For example, various media outlets and websites regularly report on the leading law firms in the United States by gross revenue, profits per partner, and revenue per lawyer. These law firms also contribute to public studies which analyze diversity data. Even more data is available in the United Kingdom thanks to recent legislation requiring disclosure of gender-based pay data. For a data thirsty Canadian, I am jealous of the transparency available elsewhere.
That is why I took the somewhat unusual step as an individual of subscribing to Pirical. It is a database used primarily by recruiters and large law firms and others with far deeper pockets than myself to make smart, data-driven decisions regarding the legal labour market. I became interested in the database as a result of one of their employees sharing some gender-based insights around partnership numbers and growth over time. After connecting with their helpful staff, I decided to subscribe and, hopefully, recover some of the costs through this Substack. I have not found any comparable data available on Canadian law firms elsewhere.
How does Pirical get their data? Good question. They actually do something that I have, on occasion, tried to do manually. They use publicly available information that the firms publish on their websites and that individual lawyers and firms share on LinkedIn - smart. It is thanks to this data that I was able to write this article.
I am a fairly vocal (and perhaps annoying) proponent of women in the legal profession and also for making our legal workplaces a healthier place to work. Based on my own experiences in Canada, I tended to assume that most large firms, on average, are not doing a very good job on either metric. Turnover seems incredibly high and at times I feel like a unicorn for still being in private practice as a mid-career female lawyer. But how do we compare internationally? Well, thanks to Pirical, I have been able to run some numbers. I was surprised by what I found.
The results are only available for paying customers. Why? Because I had to pay to get the data and need to make some money back.
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