March Legal Job Market Update
Andrew Murdoch
Managing Director
This is an in-house legal job market update.
There are a number of interesting aspects about the job market currently.
The first is we have seen very few redundancies.
In fact, there have been fewer redundancies over the past year than what they were pre COVID. It looks as though JobKeeper fulfilled its role.
We’re also finding millennials are very reluctant to leave their jobs at the moment. So very few lawyers at the 1 to 7 year level are currently looking for roles.
A LinkedIn survey recently found that 81% of millennials plan to stay in the job due to perceived risk.
On the other hand, we’re finding lots of senior lawyers are looking to move roles. I suspect that’s because they’ve been in job one year longer than what they had planned and they’ve just stayed in that job just to get through the COVID period.
We’re also seeing markets fragment somewhat. So rather than having it in-house, a national in-house legal job market, we’re finding states are moving at different rates. So those that were least affected by the pandemic, Western Australia, and New South Wales have a stronger legal job market than others.
We’re seeing a continued growth in the job market as certainty and confidence returned to the market. This is predominantly in the interim market as companies still seek to retain some flexibility due to continued uncertainty.
We expect that the interim job market will continue to grow over the next 3, 2 six months and quite strongly as the vaccines roll out and borders remain open. As that confidence continues, we expect that a permanent job market will strengthen in around nine months to 12 months, as we’re also well aware that everything can change very quickly.
So I’ll give another market update in a month and we’ll see how things have changed, then.
Thank you.
