For New Zealand law firms, the past four years have been a masterclass in resilience — navigating a pandemic-cratered market, a brutal war for talent, expense blowouts, and an economy that spent much of 2023 and 2024 in recession, all while clients demanded more and paid less willingly.
That grinding period of strategic discipline has now delivered its reward: the Thomson Reuters Institute’s 2026 State of the New Zealand Legal Market report reveals an industry that has not just recovered but genuinely rebuilt, with profits surging 16.5%, revenue back to pre-COVID levels at 10.3% growth, and a surprise boom in disputes work rewriting assumptions about where legal demand actually comes from.
It is, by any measure, the strongest result New Zealand law firms have posted since before the pandemic — and the question now is whether the lessons learned in the lean years are embedded deeply enough to protect what has been so carefully rebuilt.
