Overall demand for legal services

"Overall demand for legal services has been essentially flat for the last three and a half years leading to meager revenue growth," said Dan DiPietro, chairman of the law firm group at Citi Private Bank. "This has been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise tepid environment."The litigation boom is being driven, in part, by a stepped-up effort from government authorities to increase the oversight of Wall Street after they were criticized for not doing enough in the years before the financial crisis.In a speech earlier this month, Andrew J. Ceresney,Fashion Dresses the new co-head of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, trumpeted what he saw as his agency's more combative approach. "When I first started, I had said that one of my goals was to help bring the swagger back to the enforcement division," he said. "And I feel like we have succeeded in doing that."

Adding to the headaches for banks ― and the opportunities for lawyers ― are the swelling number of regulatory agencies. The newly minted Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, has taken aim at banks' credit card practices. In New York, the state's banking authority, the Department of Financial Services, has gone after banks for funneling billions of dollars on behalf of nations like Iran.Corporate law firms have long positioned their practices to capitalize on the business trends of the day,Fashion Dresses from the boom in bankruptcies in the wake of Enron and WorldCom to the leveraged buyout mania of the last decade. The recent insider trading investigations have generated hours upon hours of billable work. But for the most part, those cases are not especially lucrative as they are leanly staffed with only a small team of lawyers.

Cases involving money laundering or mortgage-backed securities, however, require large teams of lawyers to review millions of pages of documents and to interview armies of bank executives. These sprawling investigations have forced Wall Street banks to divert billions of dollars in profit from shareholders into the coffers of corporate law firms.Other big banks have come under fire. In a civil case,Fashion Dresses federal prosecutors in Manhattan accused Bank of America last October of carrying out a scheme through its Countrywide Financial unit that supposedly defrauded government-backed mortgage agencies by churning out loans without adequate controls.But JPMorgan alone has become a full-employment act for corporate lawyers as the bank, once a favorite in Washington,Fashion Dresses faces scrutiny from at least seven federal agencies, several state regulators and two foreign countries. On Friday, Marianne Lake, JPMorgan's chief financial officer, cautioned that legal expenses exceeded what "we could have anticipated even a short while ago."

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