January 2025 Eye on ESI Looked Back at 2024 Stats and Detailed What’s Ahead

January 2025’s Eye on ESI brought together the regular monthly trio of ACEDS President Michael Quartararo, ACEDS VP Marbel Rivera, and TRU Staffing Partners’ Founder and CEO Jared Coseglia. This month’s special guest Stephen Dooley, director of Electronic Discovery and Litigation Support at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, joined the team to discuss the current ESI job market trends and predictions for the year ahead.

Coseglia: Today we will take a look at the whole year in review. We now have December metrics and we’ll talk about the predictions for the year ahead, and then really dive into the data from last year, so we can see why we are predicting things the way we are. We added one new slide here: people want to know where this data is coming from. See the slide above for all the resources TRU uses to provide the info we present each month.

All job applicants come with lots of information about salary, compensation, desires, wants, hopes, and dreams, and we work to capture all of that metrically. The hard data comes from hard data, meaning salaries are actual salary data. Hopefully, that's helpful in giving everybody a sense of where this information comes from.

We start every webinar giving some of the hot jobs TRU is working on. The slide above shows where we are at, The bulk of the hiring is in the middle of the marketplace. There are lots of project manager and senior analysts/RelativityOne jobs available. We're starting to see legal AI jobs become available. 

Dooley: 100% agree. We're always looking at ways to expand our value and make sure that we're defining the middle in a way that's in line with where the clients are going. So looking at things that are multidisciplinary is definitely a focus.

Coseglia: And it'll be interesting to see. Within this area, I have a prediction. I think you're going to see in-house corporate ESI pros, who have had their hands on AI technology, begin driving how law firms engage or don't engage with AI based on pricing models changing and new services becoming available. This will be based on the demands and needs of what their corporate clients are asking for and where technology and human capital intersects within those needs.

eDiscovery Salary Averages

This was the observation that Stephen made, and I think it's worth sort of unpacking, which is what you're starting to see here and now. US law firm salaries are based on the rate of hire, meaning what people are actually paying to acquire talent. 

Then with the vendors, you’ll see that those numbers are not that different from law firms when you look at senior project manager associates, senior PM team leads here. They're moving up on the vendor side now, a little bit from November to December. We're seeing PMs at $150k at vendors. That's the highest we've seen that number. Most law firms are paying the same on the high end of this range. This is the democratization of compensation as a result of a post pandemic world that we live in.

We're finally starting to see it. It's taken us almost 5 years to get there. But what we're seeing is essentially because people can hire remotely now and it's much more difficult to get people to come in for hybrid or in-office jobs. They're not quite willing to pay extra yet to do it. Meanwhile, salaries have gone up for people at the vendor side who are fully remote. The availability of talent fully remote versus the availability of talent that's willing to come into a specific geographic office have equivocated. What we expect to happen in the years ahead will be that salaries are going to go up for in-office jobs, whether they're law firm or vendor. They're going to go up because they need to pay in-office workers more money for them to not take fully remote jobs.

Dooley: One of my observations is that the West Coast seems to be calibrating quite well. In the past 5 to 10 years, they tended to be maybe 15% below where the East Coast was. But the demand didn't necessarily minimize. If anything, there was a lot more competitive need for people in place at offices on the West Coast.
Coseglia: Correct. And now the Midwest is up there, too, with what people are getting paid in the East and West Coasts. The Midwest used to be dramatically behind but were losing talent to remote jobs. Most law firms are not fully remote.

Dooley: That's the elephant in the room. As of yesterday, the Federal workforce was told to come back full time to the office. So there's definitely some fluidity that's happening. That’s one of the trends that I think was key in our discussion for 2024, and where we're in a transition. We'll see how it plays out into 2025 to see if the hybrid option is still available. That's an ongoing conversation from a manager level. You have to have individuals to navigate, but you need to align with the goals of your organization and make sure you're sustainable with your approach and retaining talent.

Remote and Hybrid vs In-Office in ESI Roles

Coseglia: Hybrid or remote work has been a retention strategy for companies for the last 5 years. 

Here you'll see month over month. and what's interesting here is there's not a lot of difference. You can see from the slide above that the jobs are almost 100% hybrid or fully remote. The dark blue line is the fully remote percentage. It's hovering at about a 4th of the marketplace, right about one in every 4 jobs is fully remote, but so few jobs are fully in office. What's interesting about this dark blue line, though, is most of those jobs that are fully remote are contract and not just vendor, but law firm contract, too. When you're a contractor, you fall into a different category of permissions and policies than if you're an FTE, and as a result, contractors tend to be able to work anywhere.

When you look at contract versus direct hire in the slide above, you see just how erratic the market has been in terms of hiring. There are peaks and valleys where people get busy and they feel like they need to staff up. That's where contractors in ESI are playing a big role.

Where are the ESI Jobs?

It might be worth looking at where the jobs are. Take a look at the pie chart on the right. This is the first time in 10 years that law firms have outpaced vendors in terms of hiring that we've tracked. Law firms are adopting RelativityOne, which is bringing business back in house. They're now staffing up to support RelOne use. Second, vendors are running lean. The number one motivator for job seekers has been burnout. Vendors have not been hiring, and they've been mostly hiring FTEs to replace people who leave. Now, what typically happens are the vendors scale up and down dramatically with contract staff. They didn't do that in 2024. Last year, they put that work on the shoulders of their existing FTEs. Those people are burned out and looking for work. In the slide above, it shows compensation is between $100k and $150k, a very small percentage in the higher range, and even a smaller percentage in the lower range. We're starting to see that expand because we're seeing salaries start to go up for middle market people. We're also just seeing more jobs start to open up at $150k to $200k, more than that is thin, but 10% is a healthy chunk of the marketplace. We expect that salaries will go up next year across the board.

What Motivates eDiscovery Job Seekers?

In terms of what motivates job seekers to go to market, burnout was number one for 12 consecutive months. Then in December, money actually moved up to the number one slot. It's very hard to convince candidates that you will change their quality of life. They'd rather you just say I'll pay you a little bit more money for your skillsets to give you an increase. Now, people are like, here's what I'm making. I'm underpaid. So I think you’ll see salaries go up because the candidate marketplace requires it
Dooley: Do you think the number 5 remote hybrid will be more of an uptick in 2025? I think it'll be a big part of the conversation.

Coseglia: Only if employers move from hybrid to fully in office. That will trigger attrition. The fastest way to get your existing staff to leave is to go from 3 days or less to 5 days in an office. We saw what happened with Amazon. They reversed in some ways. 

Past that, we think the burnout will move down. People want more money. I think unemployment is going move off this chart. We're seeing the number of people who are unemployed or getting fired, decreasing pretty steadily since August of last year. So I don't even think that'll be on here. The last on the last are interesting. Number 4 is a real motivator. And I think what you're actually going to see is Number 4 become a part of getting into AI.

Dooley: I do think that whole approach to AI with a program and vision, which you are actively working on, can be a real attractor to ESI pros. I know that we're trying to do that as a practice and had different tools to work with. And that's been very helpful. But ultimately, the experience that we're developing is more of what to do and what not to do. That kind of translates into real value much faster. But if the organization is doing that, and if the candidates are kind of focused on that, I think that can be a nice little marriage with being able to create a place where they can have some challenges.

Coseglia: Yes, you might have a much easier time breaking into legal AI, because the employers don't know what they're looking for yet. A lot of times, it's a window-shopping experience and they are much more willing on the employer side to look at the candidate holistically and see how that human can come and do things and have an impact, whereas ediscovery, they're definitely looking at things from a very specific perspective, most of them 95% of the market with a skillset that you can go and get. You can go and train and buy, or you can get through experience. But you can't get training on AI or a certification on AI that gives you that instant leverage in the job market. 

Lastly, Coseglia pointed out the ESI industry is set to become extremely busy with the advent of a new presidency. He predicts litigation will skyrocket, deregulation is going to lead  to increased litigation, and everyone in ediscovery should be prepared for a very busy couple of years. Now is the perfect time to get that new role or to hire those experienced candidates. Reach out to TRU Staffing Partners today to get in on the action.

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