When choosing outside firms to handle legal matters, a new survey indicates corporate law departments are not necessarily knocking on the doors of the largest 50 U.S. law firms, instead going to those that are a somewhat smaller—but still “large enough.”

The “CounselLink Enterprise Legal Management Trends Report,”conducted by LexisNexis division CounselLink, looked at data collected from more than two million legal invoices, covering 300,000 matters. The report concluded that corporate legal departments are increasingly choosing “large enough” firms—those with a number of attorneys ranging from 201 to 500—over the largest firms, which have 750 lawyers or more.

Between 2009 and 2013, the survey said, the largest law departments saw their share of legal fees drop from 26 percent to 20 percent. The trend was the opposite for the “large enough,” which earned 22 percent in 2013, a four-point uptick from 2009.

Kris Satkunas, director of strategic consulting for CounselLink and main author of the report told CorpCounsel.com that she believes the rise of the “large enough” firms is “economics at work.”

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