Market voices: The legal community Byron Kirkland, Managing Partner, Smith Anderson Leslie Packer, Managing Partner, Ellis & Winters LLP

Byron Kirkland

Managing Partner Smith Anderson

The Raleigh-Durham economy is highly diversified, which is great for businesses like ours. It’s so diverse that we’re not dependent on any particular industry or at risk of the ups and downs that one sector might experience. The businesses and industries that tend to be the strongest here are life sciences, agricultural tech, IT, software, energy, real estate, banking and finance. There are lots of growth areas, which in turn attract other, similar businesses. The Research Triangle Park region also supports an enormous amount of entrepreneurial activity that has helped create an entire ecosystem of activity to keep our business economy stable and thriving.

Our commercial real estate practice has been booming. That may be specific to our region and regions like the Triangle because businesses have learned that there’s an advantage to being in a setting where you can have more office space and a larger square footage per person. In our industry, at law firms in large metropolitan settings like New York, where people are more closely packed together, those employees are still not returning to the office. Our region is attractive because of the inexpensiveness of the land relative to places like New York. In general, our practice areas remain very busy. A good thing regarding the economy is that we did not see a sharp increase in our bankruptcy practice. Leslie Packer

Managing Partner Ellis & Winters LLP

Mary Nash Rusher

Managing Partner, Raleigh McGuireWoods

The firm expects the Raleigh office to grow, not because we have to, but because we have this great combination of being in a great place to live and yet offering people the opportunity to work on really sophisticated legal work. Because of the way we work in practice groups across offices, we have people in a wide range of practice areas who can work from the Raleigh office but have practices across the country. We expect that to continue going forward.

Our advisory work picked up significantly because we were helping our clients do what we were doing, implementing procedures to enable remote working. On top of that, we were helping them adjust to the new laws that were coming out of Congress: the FFCRA (Family First Coronavirus Response Act), you had paid leave all of a sudden, the unemployment system changed radically, along with the rules, clients having to deal with layoffs, the PPP loans. For about five or six months, there was a monumental shift in how we practiced, at least until litigation came back. Phil Strach

Managing Shareholder Ogletree Deakins

Jeffrey Pfeifer

Chief Product Officer – LexisNexis North America

About five years ago, after acquiring a number of startups in the legal tech space, LexisNexis had an idea to build an accelerator program. Our objective was to develop a wider ecosystem to support legal tech startups. We saw an opportunity to build an ecosystem where companies could help each other get a stronger footing, especially at the early tech stage and the early company development phase. As a result, we launched the LexisNexis Legal Tech Accelerator. We have between five and 10 companies participating each year and we help these companies refine their business model for the legal market, helping them grow and develop toward scale. This has been an exciting venture, based here at our technology center on NC State’s Centennial Campus.

( ) metro region’s tech-propelled growth continues as expected. With a 2019-25 GDP growth of 16.1% projected by Oxford Economics, the Raleigh-Durham MSA ranks among the Top 10 fastest-growing metros in the country, well above the expected national average of 10.5% GDP growth. What students are studying also points to optimism for the professional services. As a reference, the University of North Carolina System’s Top 10 general areas of major for the 2019-20 cycle had Business, Management, Marketing and Related Support Services (including investment and securities, insurance, entrepreneurial studies, accounting and business/ management, finance and accounting) reigning supreme with 9,983 degrees awarded, or 74.1% of the total awards of that cycle. It also showcases a 6.5% increase compared to 2018-19’s 9,372 degrees.

Moreover, the state of North Carolina’s education leaders have set a highly ambitious goal to continue providing an attractive, educated pipeline of skilled professionals: by 2030, 2 million residents will have a high-quality postsecondary degree or credential. Enter myFutureNC, a statewide nonprofit organization created specifically to attain that 2030 goal via close collaboration between government, business and education leaders.

The professional services industry can rest easy as the Triangle’s educational machinery is producing the required entry-level talent pipeline to fill its local talent needs, while it can also find more tenured professionals considering the region offers attractive quality of life and cost of living traits to retain its talent pool.

Statewide, professional and business services employment ranked sixth among North Carolina’s supersectors by the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce, counting 649,748 professionals. By 2028, the chamber estimates the industry will be employing 704,971 professionals, an 11% variation rate equivalent to a 1.05% annual growth rate. Raleigh-Durham alone is expected to represent 27% of that estimate, amounting to 192,300 professional and business services professionals — a leading indicator of the sector’s strength in the region.

Accounting and insurance Accounting firms were instrumental throughout the pandemic in structuring recovery plans for small businesses and large corporations alike. The uncertainty sprouting from COVID-19’s economic ripple effects stressed the importance of contingency plans across all industry verticals, even more so for those most affected.

In parallel, the different draws for the Small Business ( )