What managers are looking for: 2025 legal industry trends
The current hiring focuses are as follows:
Three quarters – 76 per cent – of legal managers are hiring new staff for permanent rolesAn additional 22 per cent are focused on backfilling permanent roles that have been vacated86 per cent of Canadian hiring managers are struggling to find skilled legal talent
Strategic priorities for legal hiring in 2025
Here’s what’s topping the agenda of leaders in the legal sector for the second half of 2025.
Top priorities for law firms:
Expanding to new practice areas
Inclusion efforts
AI and legal technology integration
Top priorities for legal departments:
Data security and privacy compliance
Compliance and regulatory affairs
Technology implementation and automation
Contract talent trends in the legal sector
A staggering 90 per cent of legal leaders are increasing their use of contract professionals in the second half of 2025. This strategy is about more than just temporarily addressing staff shortages; it's about accessing specialized skills crucial in today’s legal job market.
According to legal managers, the top benefits of engaging contract talent include:
Faster staffing for critical roles Flexibility in scaling their workforceAccess to specialized skills or expertiseCost savings compared to permanent hires
Data methodology
The surveys cited were developed by Robert Half and conducted by an independent research firm. Results may not total 100% due to rounding or allowing for multiple responses. Respondents included executives, hiring managers from small (10-99 employees), midsize (100-999 employees) and large (1,000-plus employees) businesses in private, publicly listed and public sector organizations across Canada.
Over 420,000 new positions from more than 5,400 unique independent job boards and company websites provided by TextKernel are represented in our analysis of in-demand roles, including 6,300-plus placements from Robert Half. This dataset includes roles across the finance and accounting, technology, marketing and creative, legal, administrative and customer support, and human resources professions.
