With the market so tight, the number of firms and practitioners is fairly stable. After an initial period of growth in the late 1980s, the number of law firms with maritime interests has remained fairly stable. Companies that currently don't have maritime experience are not seeking to acquire it, nor are those that do have it looking to ditch it. There have been mergers in the past. Some have affected the maritime law business, others haven't.
Full mergers are rare.
The market for arbitration work is similarly compact. Former judges or brokers do get some work, but even Ken Carruthers, a former admiralty judge in New South Wales, doesn't do it exclusively. It doesn't stop people from promoting themselves as arbitrators, though. But 'approved' and 'experienced' are two different things. Arbitration suffers from the workings of its own peculiar chicken and egg mechanism in Australia, according to Davis.