Outside counsel teams working on mergers and acquisitions are typically much larger than teams working on other legal issues for companies, according to a report from LexisNexis CounselLink.

On average, there are nine law firm attorneys who bill on M&A matters. At the high-end of the range considered normal, there can be as many as 17 billing lawyers.

No other practice area features more than five billing lawyers on average, according to the CounselLink 2023 Trends Report.

As M&A matters grow in size, so do the law firm teams handling those deals for legal departments.

M&A matters with outside counsel spending between $500,000 and $1 million feature an average of 19 billing lawyers, the report found.

M&A projects where legal spend exceeds $1 million typically include 33 billing attorneys.

Kris Satkunas, director of strategic consulting at LexisNexis CounselLink, has described M&A matters as “highly strategic, mission-critical transactions.”

High-dollar work

Legal spend on outside counsel handling M&A work can add up quickly, as partners working on deals charge more than any other practice area. M&A partners also increased their rates by the highest percentage last year.

The median partner hourly rate for M&A matters was $955 an hour in 2022, a 6.4% uptick from 2021, according to the CounselLink report.

M&A work often requires significant partner engagement and is typically handled by the largest and most expensive law firms, the report said.

For example, the largest 50 firms handled 68% of M&A work last year, which helped those firms increase their market share of legal work in the U.S. to nearly 50%.

“Corporate counsel can mitigate individual attorney rate increases by adjusting staffing mix,” a press release about the CounselLink report said. 

Other team sizes

Meanwhile, corporate matters typically result in the second-largest outside counsel teams.

Law firm teams working on those matters feature an average of five lawyers, and at the high end of the normal range they can include 10 billing attorneys.

Commercial and contracts work, as well as regulatory and compliance work, typically see four external attorneys billing on each matter.

At the very low end, intellectual property matters average two attorneys billing per matter.

The CounselLink analysis of the timekeepers billing on various matters only included those with lawyer titles: partners, associates and other counsel.

The matters that made up the CounselLink analysis were those that have been active in the last three years, have gone through their full lifecycle and have accumulated material amounts of legal spend (at least $25,000). The resulting population was tens of thousands of matters.

Overall, the CounselLink 2023 Trends Report was derived from a database of more than $52 billion in legal spending across more than 420,000 timekeepers and more than 1.4 million matters.