For this year-end session of Eye on ESI, TRU Staffing Partners’ Founder and CEO Jared Coseglia was joined by ACEDS President Mike Quartararo and ACEDS VP of Strategy and Client Engagement Maribel Rivera to discuss current ediscovery industry trends as well as predictions for the first few months of 2025. Coseglia kicked off the interactive webinar.
Coseglia: We’re starting with our top 5 hottest jobs in the ESI industry. We've got senior executive level jobs, forensics, ediscovery, etc. The ediscovery market is about to get extremely hot and there's opportunity for everybody in the market. The fourth quarter was our best quarter of the year. A lot of that has to do with the volume of job opportunities accelerating and people hiring a little bit faster. We're going to cover the whole year's trends and other topics during this session.
The slide above shows our biggest takeaways from 2024, and that'll lead us into what some of our predictions are for 2025. Since this is our year-end review, we thought we would point out the most remarkable trends we’ve seen. First, it's been 10 years since we've seen law firm hiring outpace ediscovery vendor hiring, and this has been an undeniable trend for this year. A lot of it has to do with the adoption of RelativityOne, and people bringing work in-house: first, technology licensing, followed by staffing, then by scaling and accelerating growth.
That’s happening in law firms and in corporate a bit. But reciprocally, the vendors ran really lean this year, and you’ll see what the impacts of that were in some of our other top takeaways, as that leanness permeates through things like what motivated job seekers, where the jobs were, how many were remote or contract, and so on.
Second, burnout was the No. 1 motivator for job seekers in eDiscovery for 11 consecutive months. Wanting more money reclaimed the No. 1 slot in December.
Quartararo: Before we go too far down the list, I want to return to your top bullet first. How much does wanting to innovate as it relates to generative AI, etc., weigh into law firms’ hiring, outpacing providers?
Coseglia: I think it weighs heavily in a long-term strategy. Maybe not in the most immediate impact from a skills standpoint, but what you’re seeing here are law firms being keenly aware that they’re only going to get access to aiR in Relativity through RelOne. So, they've got to change their models if they want access to that technology, or they've got to lean into their vendors’ managed service agreements more heavily to access that. What we're also seeing is the shift in eDiscovery in terms of law firms having more of a dominance, in hiring versus vendors. Previously, vendors were outpacing law firms in terms of hiring consistently for the last 10 years. So yes, I think it's about AI.
Rivera: How do you see the public sector adapting to these cloud-based eDiscovery tools? Are they reluctant still?
Quartararo: I think the attitude toward cloud-based tools has changed. In my law firm days, there was constant resistance to it, and I think that the pandemic helped. and the barriers have been broken down. They were all security concerns back in the day. So now, the thinking is let Microsoft worry about security. Let Amazon worry about security. Outsource that risk away from your firm and to a provider and you'll find more productivity in cloud-based solutions.
Coseglia: I look at it from a slightly different perspective. Because when I hear the word government, the thing to me that separates most government opportunities from all others is the demand that they be physically in an office all the time. The upside being that you're not taking your phone or laptop home with you. That's part of their security protocol. So while they might be moving to the cloud with technology, they're certainly not moving to the cloud with their talent. And that's very reciprocal to how the vendors and the consulting firms are approaching things. The law firms are somewhere in the middle, and since the law firms have done most of the hiring, we're also going to see a lot more jobs being hybrid in the market in 2024, which we'll get to in a second.
In terms of the third bullet point on the slide above, there was a strong focus on full-time hiring in 2024. It does go back and forth, and we'll show you both month over month and year over year. Firms and vendors were focused on full-time hires for a couple of reasons: One is because there wasn’t a big surge in litigation they needed to staff up for. Second, we were just coming out of the “great recession” where people weren't looking to do a lot of hiring.
It's remarkable, though, how much focus was on full-time hiring and how quickly that shifted in the fourth quarter. We’re seeing trends work on about a two-year cycle and since the non-recession of late 2022, we have really rebounded.
Next, in bullet 4, executive opportunities are scarce. They were scarce for all of 2024, and what opportunity is there, is very competitive.
Quartararo: They're just staying put right? There's no other real explanation.
Coseglia: There’s not a lot of new opportunity because people are not leaving, and often people are leaving and not being replaced or they’re promoting from within. So there’s not a lot of opportunity for people from the outside coming in.
For the fifth bullet, 70% of the jobs were hybrid because of law firm and direct hire focus from the market and 30% were fully remote.
Lastly, less than 30% of jobs were fully remote, and most of those fully remote jobs are contract. There are not a lot of employers hiring fully remote. So, when those opportunities come up, they are coveted and those jobs fill infinitely faster than the hybrid or in-office jobs.
Rivera: Do we expect the hiring surge to continue throughout 2025? Are things going to continue to get better or stay put with solid budgets?
Coseglia: I have a very specific perspective on this. TRU is going to do a whole webinar about this soon about the Trump Administration and its impact on the job market. Specifically, in the legal technology vertical, they’re going bring in a wave of deregulation. Deregulation leads to more litigation because the risk for corporations changes. We expect eDiscovery to remain very busy with litigation.
Let’s talk about our predictions because they tie into everything we talked about:
That leads us to stats on salaries:
There have been increases in salaries in the last 30 days. We’ve had employers come to TRU asking to repost jobs at higher compensations. We’re seeing the market on the vendor side move up. They’ve just been running too lean for too long. They’ve got to acquire talent. They must do it quickly because they may not get new hies until January. So, salaries actually went up to try to fill the open roles.
You could see that direct hire exceeded contracting for ESI throughout 2024. Now in December, we're at almost 50/50% of the marketplace. We anticipate it's going to increase into the first quarter with full-time work increasing proportionally to contract.
Contract versus direct hire over the past seven years. You can see full-time hiring has exceeded contracting, except for 2020. We think it's going to be 50/50 for the next couple of years.
This is indicative of law firms having the bulk of the jobs this year. You could see just how few jobs were fully remote. Most jobs are two or three days in an office. But the uptick in remote work is a direct result of more contract hiring, which is fully remote.
If we look year over year, the market totally shifted in terms of remote versus in-office. But you can also see here, where it’s a steep decline in our rebound from the pandemic.
Burnout held the No. 1 spot for 11 consecutive months. Money was No. 2. Unemployment was No. 3, boredom and/or lack of challenge was No. 4, and remote hybrid work held onto No. 5. My guess is, we won't even see No. 5 on the chart next year, and the markets accepted that reality.
New technologies, such as AI and cloud-based solutions, are continually evolving. The Eye on ESI series helps you stay updated on these trends and allows job seekers and hiring managers to leverage the latest tools for more effective job searches and hiring practices. To learn more about the tips and trends you’ve seen here, reach out to the talent agents and account managers at TRU Staffing Partners.
Did you miss the live broadcast of this action-packed webinar? Click here to watch the replay.