Trends in Hiring Interim In-House Counsel
In-house Legal Practice Trends: A Comparison of 2023 and 2024
The chart above showcases a comparative analysis of FLEX’s key legal practice areas, focusing on the distribution of efforts across different categories between 2023 and 2024. Each bar indicates the percentage of legal work allocated to a particular area during these two years, revealing notable shifts in interim in-house legal needs among FLEX’s client base.
Key Observations:
1. Dominance of Tech Transactions
Tech transactions emerge as the most dominant category in both years, commanding over 50% of the workload. This reflects the importance of technology-driven deals among FLEX’s innovative client base.
More consumer facing platform clients requested marketing and content support in 2024. Hardware requests also made up a greater percentage, including semiconductors, devices, smart vehicles, and robotics.
While fintech commercial roles decreased, we saw fintech requests increase in other practice areas, including product counseling. There was consistent demand for outbound and inbound support, and like prior years, outbound sales support was highest in demand. FLEX also saw commercial needs with a growing number of AI companies this year.
2. Product Counsel and Corporate Law
Product Counsel and Corporate legal services saw steady performance, with percentages relatively similar between 2023 and 2024. Their consistent demand suggests that companies continue to prioritize legal support for product compliance and corporate governance.
While demand for generalist product counsel remained our single highest area of demand, there was an increase in requests for more specialized skillsets this year. Our second most popular product focus was, perhaps unsurprisingly, for attorneys with AI expertise, followed by marketing-focused counsel and fintech attorneys.
With tech continuing reductions in force this year and very qualified attorneys joining the available temporary workforce, clients continued to hold attorneys to a very high bar, not just seeking plug and play product counsel experience, but also in-house experience in the exact industry they were hiring for.
Corporate engagements made up 10% of our overall client demand in 2024, decreasingly slightly but remaining relatively stable from 2023 to 2024 overall. We continued to see a slowdown in M&A, which in previous years has made up over a third of our corporate demand. However, some experts say that M&A could possibly increase in 2025, in addition to increased IPO activity.
Along that line, demand for securities attorneys remained steady, making up 22% of corporate demand in 2024, down slightly from 27% in 2023. Demand for public company generalists also remained steady.
Demand for corporate generalists, typically from our emerging company clients without full-time in-house counsel, continued to be our largest client demand area.
3. Privacy Trends
There was a slight uptick in privacy requests in 2024, underscoring the growing significance of data protection and regulatory compliance as global privacy laws become more stringent.
Demand for general privacy advice and counsel was a driving factor for the increase in privacy request percentage. Privacy demand grew across industries, including healthtech, with HIPAA and data experience as focus areas. Many clients that relied on FLEX for technology transactions also requested support in privacy compliance or DPAs in 2024.
4. Decline in Employment and Life Sciences
Employment law and Life Sciences requests each made up a smaller percentage of overall demand this year.
5. Remaining Practice Areas
Intellectual property (IP), compliance, and litigation represent smaller percentages of total client requests. Compliance significantly grew year over year with an increase in ESG and policy demands but remains a small percentage of work. Stability in IP and litigation requests indicates continued reliance on these specialized practice areas, although with no significant surge in demand.
Conclusion
This data provides valuable insights for companies to strategize what legal practice areas may require interim in-house legal support. With the clear prominence of tech transactions, growth in product counseling, and rising need for privacy and AI-related legal expertise, companies might consider reallocating resources and legal training to meet these growing demands, and proactively exploring alternative legal service providers that can help identify lawyers with these skillsets to cover increases in workflow, resignations, or leaves of absence.