Top-tier law firms have continued to lose certain clients to their smaller cousins throughout 2010. According to one mid-tier managing partner, it's a trend that's only going to gather momentum in the future.

For some time now, we've been hearing about the rise of the mid-tier law firms as corporate clients look to explore alternative and cheaper legal service offerings to the top-tier.

At least that's the opinion plenty of mid-tier law firms have been keen to share over the last couple of years. While spokespeople from top-tier firms have avoided admitting defeat in this regard, firms like DibbsBarker and Herbert Geer have noted that clients are looking further afield for legal services as they seek to avoid the price-tag attached to top-tier firms.

John Nerurker, the CEO of Mills Oakley, believes this trend is about to go one step further.

In discussing key trends likely to impact the Australian legal sector in 2011 with Lawyers Weekly, Nerurker made some bold predictions about the future make-up of legal services across the country.

Such predictions point to a world of legal services turned on its head: where top-tier firms focus only on the large-scale corporate and litigation work and mid-tiers heed the opportunity to be the full service firms they're capable of being.

"In four or five years time, we could very well be in a position where mid-tiers today are the full service firms and the top-tier will no longer be full service," says Nerurker. "There's almost like a complete reshuffling of the deckchairs."

The positioning of such deckchairs started shifting during the financial crisis, says Nerurker.

As the clients of top-tier law firms sought to tighten their legal spend in response to financial pressures, they looked to the mid-tiers to save some cash. There, they found quality legal services at cheaper hourly rates.

But now, although the economy continues to slowly recover, such deckchairs may not necessarily return to their former places.

If clients can find quality legal services at mid-tier law firms and pay less for the privilege in the process, just how can they be persuaded to return to the top-tier service providers they were once accustomed to?

According to Nerurker, it's highly likely that they won't - at least not on the scale that the top-tier firms may have been used to.

And Nerurker questions if top-tier law firms will even want to support practice areas like workplace relations and property where the work is somewhat commodity driven and clients are realising they don't have to rely on expensive, high-end legal services to get a quality job done.

"I think there's been a response in the Australian legal profession amongst our top-tier competitors and that has been to focus on the high end M&A work and bet-the-house type litigation, everything else is becoming an ancillary practice area," says Nerurker. "It's gathering pace where the top-tier are almost becoming a bit boutiquish in that they want to focus on two discreet areas of law."

And while such a focus may not impact the competiveness of such law firms to continue their dominance in the industry, it could have an impact on personnel and where legal talent moves.

Nerurker believes that top-tier law firms may very well find themselves over partnered, especially as they seek to focus on two lucrative areas of law that require volume of legal talent rather than specialised skills. "Already, there are less opportunities coming up through the ranks. I've never seen more senior associates looking to get out of the top-tier to move to a mid-tier environment in order to pick up a partnership title because they don't see it happening in a top-tier firm."