ILSAC International Legal Services Statistics
ILSAC's International Legal Services Statistics project was conceived in 2004, in response to concerns that the available statistics may understate the export and cross-border market for Australian legal services. One of the key reasons for this is that the official statistics, collected by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), do not identify earnings of overseas branch offices of Australian law firms specifically as legal services 'exports', but rather as 'returns on investment'.
ILSAC agreed to undertake the project in mid-2005 as a collaborative exercise with the Australian Government Attorney-General's Department, the Law Council of Australia, Austrade and eight leading Australian law firms, all of which contributed financially to the project. FMRC Legal conducted the survey.
The project aimed to improve the quality and relevance of legal services statistics by:
- including income from the cross-border supply of legal services that does not meet the technical definition of 'export' (specifically, commercial presence income)
- adopting categories that are more meaningful for decision-makers in the profession, and
- extending the range of data gathered to include information about the different types of legal services, and the ways in which they were delivered.
ILSAC’s Second International Legal Services Statistics survey was conducted again for the year financial year 2006-07. Full details of the outcome and results are available here: