A look across thousands of PERSUIT requests · 2020 – May 2026 · with industry-level drill-downs
Every law firm pricing team, BD director, and managing partner is asking the same questions right now — where are we actually winning, is AI eroding our pricing, are we bidding aggressively enough, does our league-table position still matter. The data, drawn from thousands of competitive sourcing events over five years, has clearer answers than the conference panels do. Some of them are uncomfortable. A few are genuinely good news. This is what the buying side of the legal market looks like from inside the warehouse — for the firms competing on it.
The four-line summary
PERSUIT volume grew 7.5× in five years. The 2026 run rate suggests continued acceleration.
Five years ago, the firms with the strongest GC relationships could rely on direct phone calls for the most valuable work. That channel still exists, but a steadily larger share of high-value mandates is now flowing through structured RFPs where firms outside the immediate relationship circle get a real shot. If your BD machine is calibrated for a relationship-only world, you’re missing a market that grew 7.5×.
Financial & insurance services is the largest client industry and grew 40× since 2020. Consumer goods & retail (12×), Infotech (21×), and Construction & manufacturing (18×) have all scaled dramatically.
Same 2020 → 2026 annual series as above, scoped to a single client industry. If your firm covers a particular sector, the trajectory shows whether that buyer pool is expanding fast enough to justify BD investment. Click a tab to switch.
Corporate legal teams are unbundling. “General Legal Advice” — the catch-all retainer category — lost three full percentage points of share. The work that took its place is specific, named, and scoped: compliance, advisory, finance work. Buyers are scoping more precisely and inviting more selectively, which means firms whose marketing positions on broad practice areas (“we do litigation”) rather than specific buyer-recognizable work types are losing visibility.
Industry rotation is even sharper. Infotech departments are tilting hard toward M&A (+7.2pp) and away from real estate (−6.2pp). Energy clients are litigating more across four dispute categories simultaneously. Financial services compliance is the platform-wide growth story.
BD action: If your firm has a “compliance practice” page that hasn’t been refreshed since 2022 and a banking compliance lead who hasn’t been front-and-center in your client outreach, you’re under-represented in the largest growth category on the platform. The work is there. The match-making is the gap.
Percentage-point share change between 2020-24 baseline and 2025-YTD, top movers per industry. If your firm covers Energy clients, dispute work is gaining share across four categories — there’s BD signal in this. Click a tab to switch.
Share of requests priced fixed or capped: 72.4% (2020) → 86.7% (2026 YTD). Hourly went from 6.4% to 2.1%. This is one of the cleanest, most directional trends in the entire platform. It happened in five years.
Advisory and compliance work — the categories firms historically defended as “too uncertain to scope upfront” — moved from 81.1% to 90.6% fixed/capped over the same period. Even M&A transactional, the last bastion of “we’ll have to see,” is now priced fixed in 85.6% of cases (up from 75.9%).
If your firm still defaults to hourly for compliance, advisory, or routine transactional work, you’re not “preserving optionality” — you’re disqualifying yourself before the proposal is opened. Buyers are filtering invitations by fee model expectations. The firms that have built a pricing function with credible AFA capability are getting invited more, winning more, and protecting margin better because they’re scoping discipline up-front instead of negotiating overruns after.
Buyers are also moving to line-item pricing — discrete deliverables and sub-rates rather than a single bundled number — particularly on M&A and complex regulatory work. Proposals that lump “due diligence” into one $400k line are increasingly marked down against ones that break the work into priced sub-items.
The uncomfortable read: If your firm’s pricing committee is still essentially three senior partners weighing in by email, you’re not competing with firms that have actual pricing infrastructure. The market has moved past that. So has the buying side’s tolerance for it.
Stacked share-by-year view, scoped to a single client industry. Useful for spotting which sectors led the fixed-fee shift — and which still have hourly share your firm may be assuming away. Click a tab to switch.
The headline “AI is compressing legal fees” obscures the more useful story. Compression is real, but concentrated. The bigger pricing story is what’s happening within a single competitive RFP — where the spread between the high and low bid is enormous and getting wider. If you’re not actively benchmarking against the actual range firms are submitting, you’re either leaving money on the table or losing on price you didn’t need to lose on.
On half of all competitive PERSUIT requests in 2025, the highest bid is at least twice the lowest bid. In the top quartile of competitive RFPs, the high bid is 3-5× the low. The sample is thousands of competitive matters across both periods — large enough that this is the market, not an artifact.
Small-matter spreads jumped from 136% to 150% median (2020-24 → 2025-YTD). XXL widened most of all — from 78% to 141%. Medium, Large, and XL held roughly flat in the 100–127% band. The market is not converging on a price — the small end has firms aggressively discounting commoditizable work while others hold their rate cards, and at the top end mega-matter pricing is genuinely up for debate now that the segment is contested by three or more firms three-quarters of the time.
The actionable read for pricing teams: If your firm’s win rate is below 28% and your bids cluster in the P75 zone (top quartile of price), you’re being benchmarked against firms quoting half your number. Conversely, if you’re routinely in the P25 zone and winning at 35%+, you may be leaving meaningful margin on every win.
The composite signal: Spreads are wider than ever, but compression is concentrated. Generic discounting across the board is the wrong response. Sharper, segment-specific pricing — aggressive on small advisory/compliance, firm on M&A and complex litigation — is what the data supports.
$5M+ matters consistently represent ~1% of all PERSUIT requests across the five-year window — the absolute count rises with overall platform growth, but the share is flat. The interesting story isn’t how many; it’s where they’re landing.
The Global 200 dominates: ~91% of $5M+ wins in 2025-YTD go to Global 200 firms, up from ~85% in 2020-24. The real movement is happening within the Global 200. The top 10 dropped from 25% to 18% of mega-wins; the 11–50 mid-band climbed from 33% to 46% over the same window.
Where the BD signal lands — for firms reading this: If your firm sits in cohorts 11–50, the data is showing you’re gaining share on the highest-value work on the platform — up 13 percentage points of mega-matter wins in five years. For firms outside the Global 200, the honest read is that mega-matters concentrate in panel firms; the better attack point is the broader competitive intensity story in Section 06, where $5M+ matters now draw 3+ bidders three-quarters of the time and panel-adjacent firms have a real entry path.
The average PERSUIT request now attracts 3.3 firms, and across $500K-$5M matters — the bulk of recurring outside-counsel spend — roughly 70% of requests receive three or more proposals. The platform’s most contested category, eDiscovery, averages 4.5 firms per request. The most counterintuitive number in this section sits at the top of the value range: 75% of $5M+ matters now draw three or more bidders — the most-contested bucket on the platform. The relationship lock on mega-matters has loosened materially.
Across Medium, Large, and XL matters, 63-73% of requests receive three or more proposals. This is the meaningful middle of the market, and it’s behaving like a genuinely competitive one — multiple firms, tight pricing, real choice. For firms competing in this band, the implication is straightforward: every proposal is being read against at least two others, often three or four. Generic templates and rate-card pricing don’t survive that.
$5M+ matters now draw three or more bidders on 75% of requests — more than any other size band on the platform. Five years ago, matters of this size were almost universally relationship-sourced; the buyer phoned the trusted partner and the procurement function existed mostly to document the choice. That world is gone. The biggest matters are now the most-contested matters, and as Section 05 shows, the cohorts gaining share within the Global 200 are the 11–50 mid-band — not the top 10 and not (mostly) firms outside the Global 200. The winning posture is competitive depth, not panel breadth.
On requests under $100K, only 42% attract three or more bidders — the lowest competitive density on the platform. Roughly 38% are single-bidder awards. Small matters remain largely relationship-driven or carved out of broader engagements rather than put to genuine competition. If your firm has built a small-matter pricing playbook expecting heavy multi-firm bidding, the data says that effort is over-engineered for the segment.
eDiscovery and Legal Data Services consistently attracts the most bidders — 4.5 average. The category is commoditized enough that firms know they have to compete on price, and buyers know to invite multiple vendors. It’s the structural template every other category is converging toward — including, now, the mega-matter end of the value range.
The composite read for firms: The traditional read — “mega-matters are relationship work, the middle of the market is the only real competition” — is now wrong at the top end. Mega-matters have flipped to the most-contested bucket on the platform, and the firms gaining share there are the Global 11–50 mid-band. The middle ($100K–$5M) remains the competitive backbone. Small matters ($<$100K) remain mostly relationship-driven and shouldn’t be treated as a heavy-pricing-discipline segment.
Where a firm sits in the Global ranking is a remarkably weak predictor of overall win rate on competitive PERSUIT RFPs — every cohort clusters in a 27-33% band. The catch: ranking does predict outcomes within specific matter types, sometimes strongly. Where your firm wins is determined by category fit, not league position.
Win rates across every Global ranking cohort in 2025-YTD cluster in a narrow 27-33% band:
| Cohort | 2020-24 | 2025-YTD |
|---|---|---|
| Global 1-10 | 27.5% | 27.8% |
| Global 11-25 | 28.1% | 31.6% |
| Global 26-50 | 26.8% | 27.2% |
| Global 51-100 | 29.6% | 28.9% |
| Global 101-200 | 29.1% | 32.9% |
| Unranked | 27.9% | 28.4% |
The headline is the narrow range, not the cohort ordering: 27% to 33%. A six-percentage-point band across the entire prestige hierarchy. Global rank is a useful sorting mechanism for league tables and lateral recruiting; it is not a useful predictor of who wins a given competitive RFP at the aggregate level.
Within a single matter type, cohort variation is much sharper. General Legal Services in 2025-YTD: Global 1-10 win 70%, Global 11-25 win 71%, Global 26-50 win 69%, Global 51-100 win 63%, Global 101-200 win 51%, Unranked win 33%. The top tier dominates that category. eDiscovery: the inverse — effectively an Unranked-only market (only the Unranked cohort has meaningful sample size; their win rate is 19%). Litigation and Transactional: mostly flat (24-33% across cohorts) — these are the categories where cohort isn’t doing the work.
The action: identify the matter types where your firm’s tier actually wins more, and stop competing where it doesn’t. The aggregate 30% average across the platform is the mean of categories where you crush at 70% and categories where you struggle to 20%.
Among firms invited to competitive RFPs in 2025-YTD, the rate at which they submit a proposal has risen 3-5 percentage points across every cohort versus 2020-24 — firms are passing on fewer invitations and competing harder. Five years ago, 10-13% of invitations went unanswered; now it’s 5-9%. The mid-market and 100-200 cohorts saw the biggest jumps. The strategic implication: bidding everything is not the answer — it dilutes pricing discipline. But if your firm’s invitation conversion rate is still in the high 80s, you’re slower-moving than peers. One additional note — first-to-respond wins 38% vs 25% for fourth-to-respond, so internal process (conflicts, pricing sign-off, AFA review) is the lever, not turnaround capacity.
The high bid is ~2× the low bid on half of all competitive RFPs. On 25%, it’s 3-5×. Bidding in the P75 zone without knowing where P25 sits is leaving the matter on the table. Pricing teams that benchmark against actual platform ranges — not historical firm rates — win more and protect margin better.
Win rates across every Global ranking cohort cluster at 27-33%. Where firms actually differ is by matter type — sometimes by 30+ percentage points. Identify the three or four categories where your firm’s tier genuinely wins, build BD around those, and stop competing in categories where the data says you don’t.
86.7% of the market is now priced fixed or capped, up from 72.4% in 2020. Firms still defaulting to hourly for compliance, advisory, or routine transactional work are increasingly being filtered before the invitation list. This is a structural pricing-function build, not a per-matter judgment call.
$5M+ matters concentrate in the Global 200 (~91% of wins) and are now the most-contested bucket on the platform (75% draw 3+ bidders). The cohorts gaining share are the 11–50 mid-band, which moved from 33% to 46% of mega-matter wins in five years. For firms in that band, the BD message is to lean into bench-depth and price-discipline credentials, not to position as an alternative to the top 10. For firms outside the Global 200, mega-matters aren’t where the entry point is — the middle of the market is.
63-73% of requests in the $100K-$5M range now draw three or more bidders — the deepest competitive density in the dataset, sitting in the segment that drives the most outside-counsel spend. Win rates here are cohort-flat (27-33%), meaning matter-type fit and pricing discipline decide outcomes, not league position. This is the band where structured pricing infrastructure, fast turnaround, and category specialization translate most directly into wins.
The numbers above came from real competitive RFPs run on PERSUIT. If you’d like to see how your firm’s bid performance, win rate, or pricing compares — or what running on PERSUIT looks like from the firm side — we’d be happy to walk you through it.
All figures are drawn from competitive requests run on PERSUIT between January 2020 and May 2026. Matter values are in US dollars, converted at publish-date FX. 2026 numbers reflect five months of data and are flagged as YTD or annualized throughout. Firm rankings use the global firm pool, with everything outside the Global 200 grouped as “Unranked.” Industry drill-downs cover the buyer’s primary industry; a small share of requests aren’t industry-tagged and are excluded from those tabs only. Median values exclude a small number of outliers above $50M to keep them representative. v2.1 (June 2026): all value-bucketed and mega-matter figures refreshed after a currency conversion fix in the data warehouse.