Changes in the legal market in 2023

When the pandemic struck in 2019, it affected many different industries heavily as they had to quickly adapt to a new world of work at little to no notice. Despite being on the other side of the pandemic, there have been a lot of changes post COVID-19 that have occurred and continue to present issues, including the legal sector.

Remote Working
The most important factor is that during Covid-19, we had most firms with their entire staff working fully remote. In the past year, I have spoken to many of my clients who are in a HR capacity, who have found it very difficult to incentivise staff to bring them back to working in the office. At the beginning of the year, I have had several law firms tell me they have implemented a strict policy whereby legal support staff have to be in the office full-time.

Incentivising staff to work full time in the office is a great way to ensure that your employees stay motivated to do their job to the best of their ability. By offering something they can achieve if they hit a certain target or achieve something, they have something to work towards. Most of my clients have seen a rise in productivity levels and an boost in morale in their workplace with more of their employees returning to the office.

Restructuring of firms
The second main change I have seen is the structure of firms. Recently, I have met with several top tier law firms who have implemented a ‘hub structure’ for their support staff. It seems like a confusing concept, but it has provided efficient results when implemented correctly. The structure means that the support staff will be grouped together, and work will be allocated to a generic inbox that can be accessed by all staff.

This means that if there are staff on leave, or off sick, the work can carry on without interruption. However, I’ve seen that for this reason, these firms are employing a lot less temporary staff to cover in these short-term instances. For this reason, I expect a lot more float secretaries, who work across multiple areas of law, to be in demand this year.