A couple of recent surveys have confirmed, that in these cost savings days fueled even more by the lingering recession, many more law firms and lawyers are absorbing online research costs as overhead rather than passing them onto clients for payment.
Mattern & Associates’ 2012 Cost Recovery survey reported that clients increasingly either balk at or outright refuse to pay for legal research. Complementary of this is a recent Bloomberg Law survey of 97 law firms (ranging from 50-400 plus attorneys) showing that 43% of law firm respondents indicate they absorb more of their legal research costs today than in 2010.
We thank Rachel M. Zahorsky for providing us with these survey results in her November 14, 2012 post in the ABA Journal.