Legal industry careers have evolved a lot over the past decade, in the practice of law, legal technology and the business of law. In recent posts we’ve highlighted the changing legal market with respect to new competition law firms face and expanding corporate legal operations, as well as the areas of contract analytics and life cycle management – all of which are resulting in new career paths for legal industry professionals.
In addition to the emergence of alternative legal service providers, law firm subsidiaries and innovation divisions and expanding corporate legal operations, legal technology and service providers have also experienced exponential growth. And as expected, this growth and evolution are also creating new roles and career opportunities.
Among the largest areas of spend for legal teams is eDiscovery, which has effectively become its own segment of the legal industry as it’s grown exponentially over the past 20 years from $0.3 billion in 2002 to $3 billion in 2009 to $11 billion in 2020. Breaking that down further, spend on eDiscovery software has more than tripled over the past decade, increasing from an estimated $1.42B in 2012 to an estimated $4.32B in 2021. Likewise, spend on eDiscovery services also increased by more than two and a half times during the same period from $3.31B in 2012 to an estimated $8.78B in 2021.
This trajectory is expected to continue, according to Complex Discovery, which estimates the market will be at $15 billion by 2025. Others believe the market will grow to nearly $19B by 2026. Whichever projection proves to be accurate, the trend is undeniable and will certainly persist as more technology and service providers stay active with mergers and acquisitions, receive private equity investments and go public.
As the industry continues to grow and evolve, so too are the career paths for professionals who choose to work in this field.
Document review is an area that has traditionally served as a path to other areas of eDiscovery for those with law degrees. Common positions include not only reviewers, but review managers, project managers and data analysts, with salaries for all those roles increasing. And while remote review was available before 2020, the pandemic accelerated the shift away from work being performed in centralized review centers – opening a variety of opportunities to professionals who don’t live near those centers or want the flexibility of working outside the normal business hours.
Growing eDiscovery vendors have an array of other positions to fill today too – from leadership, sales and marketing jobs to project management and more technical roles related to forensics, data science and analytics that are evolving into AI-focused work. And new roles continue to emerge as the field itself evolves.
Legal technology has long been a great field to be part of, and with all the new investment flooding into the industry, it’s only getting better. Now is a good time to explore new career opportunities!
- Chris Egan