Research & Insights
Key Hiring Trends for In-House Legal Professionals
We examine the key trends that shaped the hiring of in-house legal professionals between January 2022 to May 2022.
The data for this section has been collected by tracking mandate closures by Vahura, as well as by using secondary sources such as information shared on social media platforms, news and relevant media publications. The sample group of this report’s study focuses on lateral moves made in the Indian corporate legal industry, between the months of January 2022 to May 2022. The analysis takes into consideration years of professional experience, location, industry domains and remuneration changes.
After collating and analyzing the information collected, we present a few of our key observations.
In the first 6 months, organizations from the BFSI, IT/ITES and Internet sectors have hired the most number of lawyers. The Internet sector organizations have been hiring at a rapid rate as we see their hiring market share to have gone up from 5% in FY 2018-19 to 14% in the first 6 months.
In this period (January to May 2022), we saw more hires in Bangalore than other cities in India. Mumbai is typically the destination with the most in-house legal hires. It remains to be seen whether this is an anomaly or the emergence of a longer term trend. While hiring of lawyers in the BFSI sector is largely in Mumbai, the increase in hiring of lawyers by the IT/ITES and Internet sector organizations is the reason for Bangalore to have topped the list.
Close to 52% of the hiring in the last 6 months has been of professionals with less than 7 years of experience, which is 7% more than our last reported numbers. Within this segment, the highest demand has been of legal professionals between 3 to 7 years of experience.
In the first 6 months, we have seen more female lawyers being hired. We have observed that more than 60% of the hiring done by IT/ITES, Internet, FMCG and Consulting services organizations were female legal professionals respectively.
The largest talent source for in-house legal departments have been lawyers from other in-house legal departments. We also see an increase in the number of professionals hired with prior law firm experience to be more than our last report. 52% of the hires made by investment funds, and 28% of the hires made by internet organizations were law firm professionals.
