Along with oppressive heat waves on the west coast and heavy rains on the east cost, it looks as if 2021 is going to produce a bumper crop of M&A dealmaking. Acquisitions of US companies totaled more than $1.7 trillion for just the first half of the year, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, with a flood of liquidity and easy access to capital serving as jet fuel for investment bankers and lawyers, bored from their year of relative inactivity. Adam Smith Esq. has a blogpost breaking down which BigLaw firms have been picking up the lions' share of all this transactional work. "You still have a lot of runway for this cycle we're in," according to an M&A partner at O'Melveny, a rosy outlook further supported by this M&A Insight report from Allen & Overy.

But apart from all those M&A dealmakers working at a feverish pace, it appears as if a summer slowdown, of sorts, is already underway. Blog readership and podcast downloads have dropped by more than 30% in recent weeks, according to marketing consultant Mark Schaefer, who attributes the slowdown to a phenomenon that has been dubbed as "revenge travel" -- as families are heading in droves to the mountains and beaches, determined to make up for all the time lost in lockdown. So if you are on the verge of launching a major content marketing campaign, you may want to consider hitting the pause button for a few weeks.

Flying in the face of such wisdom, BigHand has just released a major white paper based on the most comprehensive market survey to date, covering how law firm workflow practices have been transformed in response to the pandemic.You can download a copy of the report here. The are lots of interesting data points, which together highlight just how much day-to-day law firm operations remain in flux. Some commentators have focused on how the survey indicates law firms face a productivity and billing crunch, as lawyers working remotely are forced to handle more administrative tasks, while others have suggested that smaller and more nimble firms will gain a leg up in the war for talent. Looking at the full breadth of the report, though, the major takeaway for me is that law firms, big and small, are heading into a period of extended management experimentation and adjustment, as the business world lurches into post-pandemic recovery.

We have entered a new phase in the long-running debate over innovation in the legal market, which was kicked off by publication in The Practice, a Harvard Law School journal, of an article by Neville Eisenberg and Richard Susskind about the need for a more vertical approach to integrating legal tech and legal practice. The gist of their argument is that the prevailing assumption up until now -- that high-value, bespoke legal work should be disaggregated from more routine legal work handled by ALSPs -- is actually slowing down the transformation of the legal market. What the legal industry needs is better vertical integration up and down the value chain. You can read their article here. Now Alex Hamilton, a UK lawyer and founder of NewLaw company Radiant, has fired back an answering salvo, which makes the case that extraordinary change is already happening in the legal market but it's not coming from inside traditional law firms, where the cultural and institutional barriers to change remain fixed in place. You can read about Hamilton's riposte in this article in Legal Futures.

If you're one of those marketers who is always drawn to the next big thing -- whether that means Clubhouse or Fishbowl or TikTok -- I suggest you listen to this podcast interview with Kevin Delaney, the journalist turned entrepreneur who is co-founder of a media startup called Charter. One of the most interesting things about Delaney's story is that he launched his successful new venture simply by publishing an email newsletter. (Note: you should skip the first 20 minutes of the podcast, which features a very annoying description of media moguls partying at Sun Valley.) To many digital marketeers, the email newsletter seems passé, but as Delaney recounts his experience, it proved to be a perfect cost-effective vehicle for building his audience. Here at PinHawk, of course, we remain firm believers in the enduring value of email newsletters, not just for startup entrepreneurs like Delaney, but for law firm managers, who want to stay up on the latest market news, and lawyers of all stripes who want to build their practices.