In the past I’ve occasionally skipped a tech focussed post and looked at some general legal market posts. This is one of those posts.

A couple of stories caught my eye this last couple of weeks, an email from The Lawyer’s Horizon mailing and some data from Thomson Reuters market insight report, both related to lateral hiring and lawyer salaries.

The first was an article on Cripps, a Tunbridge Wells based law firm. It is countering larger (higher paying) city firms poaching all their lawyers by adjusting it’s leverage, as The Lawyer article puts it:

has essentially decided that hiring more junior lawyers to plug the holes left behind isn’t worth the faff. Instead, it’s now picking off paralegals from larger firms

It’s an interesting model, one similar to the Insurance practices of large firms when I started in the legal industry in the late 90’s. That led to a real commoditisation of the insurance sector, the jettisoning of said practice groups from many firms to insurance specialist juggernauts of now.

The Thomson Reuters report was on the “flight risk” of staff in law firms (legal staff) and the role most at risk, Associates. Up from an 11% likelihood in 2018-22 to a 45% risk in 2020-22. Backing up the thinking of Cripps I guess. Interestingly the report highlights that these were likely conservative numbers and the flight risk was higher than reported numbers as more than one-third of laterals changed firms even when they were not considering a move.

It may all be a moot point as reports are starting that the job market is cooling, but I have always wondered if a significant recession hit again what would be the big moves from firms, last time it was a move to lower cost bases for back office work (eg moves from London north to Manchester) or service centres in lower cost places (eg moves to Belfast, Warsaw etc). Possibly the new trends have started, but currently addressing other issues, like this to battle the current salary wars and also like technology innovation pushes in firms to both provide efficiency and new business opportunities?