The first half of this year brought four-dozen law firm mergers and acquisitions, and the pace is showing no sign of slowing down.

Figures released Monday by Altman Weil MergerLine show that there were 19 combinations in the second quarter of 2015, bringing the mid-year total to 48. This is the highest total for the first half of a year in the nine years since the company started compiling the data.

“We tend to see more mergers in the second half of the year which could produce a record number for 2015,” said Eric Seeger, principal at the legal management consulting group.

Of the deals announced in the second quarter, 79 percent were acquisitions of firms with 20 or fewer attorneys. The activity was scattered across the country with seven happening in the Midwest region.

Dentons’ merger with McKenna, Long & Aldridge was the largest combination announced in the last quarter. Dentons is also finalizing a deal with the Chinese firm Dacheng, which would make it the largest firm in the world.

Honigman, Miller, Schwartz and Cohn LLP and Cozen, O’Connor also completed deals in the second quarter.

The Detroit-based Honigman, Miller acquired boutique litigation firm Schopf & Weiss LLP, which had 14 lawyers. Cozen, O’Connor picked up 60 lawyers through its combination with Meckler, Bulger, Tilson Marick & Pearson LLP.

Seeger said firms seem to be feeling more confident about the economic climate and are resuming growth plans that were put on hold during the recession.

Rather than firms courting one or two lateral hires at a time, which can be slow and cumbersome, he said firms are also looking for more opportunities to bring on small practice groups to increase their talent pool.

“For years, there has been a natural resistance to getting acquired,” said LawVision Group LLC founding principal Joseph B. Altonji. “It’s still there, but for a variety of reasons, there’s less resistance.”

Some of the activity is connected to law firm succession planning, he said. As founders and firm rainmakers prepare to retire, they may not see a next generation of attorneys to step in.

The recession also caused many midsize firms to reduce billing rates, Altonji said, which squeezed the competitive advantage of smaller firms with 30 to 50 lawyers. He said some of these smaller firms also see an opportunity to expand their geographic reach based on client needs.

Credentia Inc. President Kay Hoppe said she is seeing a similar trend.

“There’s an appetite for being acquired because it’s thought of as safety,” she said. “Now we can compete with more cities, more talent and some of that is true.”

In her decades of experience, Hoppe said she has never seen such an aggressive level of combinations like this before in a year.

While law firm growth through mergers and acquisitions isn’t a bad concept, she cautions that it may not reap the rewards that firms are looking for. Some firms run the risk losing strong attorneys in the wake of a combination.

In other cases, there’s a large payoff such as the combinations that brought Jones, Day and Latham & Watkins LLP to the city in the early 1980s. When Latham & Watkins entered the Chicago market by acquiring Hedlund, Hunter & Lynch in 1982, Hoppe said, it brought Robert M. Dell, who became one of the firm’s most successful managing partners in its history.

Hoppe said the statistics and data on mergers reported by the legal media are also driving a perception among boutique and small firms that getting smaller is a bad thing and that a merger may be in its best interests.

“I don’t think all of these mergers are going to hold,” she said.