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K Street enjoyed another year of overall growth in 2007, but many firms’ books of business are evolving in ways that could make lobbying revenue an imperfect yardstick to measure the influence industry’s reach.
Lobbying firms large and small have long complained that semiannual surveys of their lobbying revenues conducted by the media fail to account for other moneymaking activities, ranging from regulatory work to public relations and advertising to grassroots organizing.
Now another line of business appears to be taking up an increasing amount of lobbyists’ time and energy and generating an increasing amount of revenue that does not need to be reported under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA): political intelligence-gathering for hedge funds and other Wall Street clients.
As The Hill reported first on Saturday, Patton Boggs once again set the pace for the lobbying industry and became the first firm ever to break the $40 million mark in annual lobbying revenue. For 2007, the powerhouse brought in $42.7 million from activities defined under the LDA, a 21.7 percent increase from 2006. The original story can be found at thehill.com.
Akin Gump reclaimed the No. 2 spot from Van Scoyoc Associates. Akin Gump earned $32 million in lobbying revenues in 2007, a 23.6 percent bump from the prior year. Van Scoyoc held almost flat at $28.8 million one year.
But representatives of several firms indicated that the business of K Street is becoming more complex, as are the needs of their clients. Comparisons based solely on lobbying revenue as defined by the LDA promise to be increasingly less useful.
As more firms — particularly law firms — handle work for clients who do not want their interest in an issue publicly known, the LDA revenue will tell a smaller part of the story, said Rich Gold, the head of the lobbying practice at Holland & Knight, which saw its LDA revenue increase 19 percent to $16.9 million in 2007.
“It’s getting less representative,” he said of the lobbying law.
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