Are Law Firms strategically hiring now?

In this unprecedented time of global and fiscal uncertainty an accurate assessment of the long and short term market for lawyers is difficult to gauge.

What we do know for sure is law firms are experiencing the crisis differently depending on their tech readiness for workforces largely working remotely.

And so it follows many firms are very cautious to commit to new hires generally. Whilst this is most evident at sub-partner solicitor levels it is less impacting on the senior and partner hires where those partners are more self-regulating and self-financing.

Opportunities

The winners we are seeing in the market are law firms who are using this time to strategically hire the "best and brightest" who may be coming on the market because of this situation, with firms letting good people go. Our legal search practice is frankly thriving during this time with quality candidates reaching out to us....... and we are certainly "open for business."

The other winners in this melee are the short term contract sub-partner lawyer market as everyone seeks flexibility without commitment and clients still need to be serviced and new projects continue on a daily basis requiring additional sub-partner 'worker bee' lawyers.

We will likely see a shift in practice areas as well with areas heavily dependant on transactional work being quieter whilst areas such as insolvency and dispute resolution becoming more busy and needing an allocation of short term resources.

Budget and bottom-line focussed as always, firms will endeavour to shift around lawyers internally as much as possible to limit recruitment outlay. This of course is simply a sideshow to the bigger global picture times we are living through ruled predominantly by damage control as the world goes into overdrive in response to the Covid 19 pandemic.

Stephen Moss is a shareholder in specialist Legal Search and Recruitment firm ECP Legal, and acknowledges his partner Sarah Street for input into this article. Sarah can be contacted on 0408 999 880 for follow up.....