Employers

Florida has the fourth largest economy in the country and given that there is a lot of legal work coming down the pipe, these next few years are poised to boom due to many factors. 

Legal associate lateral hiring jumped 149% from 2020 to 2021 as law firms compete against each other to recruit and retain the best talent.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, law firm managing partners have advocated for the necessity of bringing attorneys back into the office, especially to be able to mentor the next generation of lawyers and protect their firm’s culture. While firms have developed hybrid work models, these leaders are about to find out whether lawyers value their law firm’s culture and mentorship over the ability to remote work. 

The largest law firms in New York elevated a large number of new partners over the last year, after promotions slowed down in the previous 12-month period that intersected  with the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In order to understand how law firm leaders from the largest firms in the U.S. are currently navigating the competitive market for legal talent, a tech company called Thine, that develops and deploys pre-hiring and integration assessments, engaged Ari Kaplan Advisors to interviews wide variety of professionals making decisions about hiring, development, and promotion in AmLaw 100 law firms. For this research, Ari Kaplan had the chance to interview 30 chief talent officers along with directors and managers of recruiting between Sept. 3 and Nov. 24 last year. 

The global pandemic helped to guide a new wave of remote working—and given the rise of the Omicron variant, that trend seems unlikely to change any time soon. 

Since there have been shifting workplace preferences and a reemergence of trial work in a pandemic-era stupor, litigation practices of all sizes are facing high rates of churn among legal support professionals, giving an often undervalued sector of the legal industry’s workforce an advantage in recruitment. 

In the midst of pandemic-era legal qualms and a backlog of court cases rolling in, there is no shortage of demand for legal services for midsize firms in 2021’s fourth quarter.

The pandemic brought extensive and sudden changes to the legal field. Some change, which included the improved use of technology and increased efficiencies for many lawyers, was long needed. 

While the landscape of work is changing in the legal world and other fields, in a lot of cases for good, the separating line between working in-house and joining private practice is wearing thin. In the past few weeks, many lawyers have moved out of in-house roles to become partners, counsel or associates at law firms.