EP Dine is now a part of the ZRG family. Read the press release
In 2025, the landscape of legal hiring in the US is set to undergo transformation. Emerging trends from 2024 will crystalize, and new economic, social, political, and other phenomena will make new impacts on law firms, professionals, and students across the country.
Legal hiring will continue to evolve rapidly, driven primarily by technological advancements, shifting workplace values, and new global challenges brought on by geopolitical turbulence.
Below, we’ll walk through 9 trends to keep track of as the year unfolds.
One trend we’re seeing amongst the top 100 law firms in the country (the Am Law 100) is that associate rates are on the rise. This includes increases of about 9% across the board, with some associates making up to 14% more per hour, per Valeo Partners.1 These figures are higher than the increases observed between 2022 and 2024, rivaling the major acceleration seen during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the years after the 2007 financial crisis. Am Law 50 firms are also now more regularly billing Third Year Associate hours at $1,000 or more.
What this all means is that firms are going to compete fiercely for top law associate hires. On the one hand, stronger pay opportunities suggest a strong labor market that is favorable to legal job seekers. But, on the other, rising costs come with rising expectations and hiring stakes, both for fresh law school graduates and more seasoned attorneys seeking a change of scenery.
In 2025, experts are also predicting an increase in private equity deal activity. This means that the demand for transactional attorneys and deal specialists will surge as well, driving a wave of hiring that should see professionals in these niches feast for at least the next year.
According to The American Lawyer, global merger and acquisition (M&A) value was up more than 10% in 2024.2 This was a boon for most firms that deal in these kinds of transactions, with several in the top 20 growing from 24.5% to 180% by virtue of working on high-value deals. Most importantly, 2024 was a get-back year after a relative dip in 2023, and most experts interviewed by The American Lawyer predict continued growth in 2025 and beyond.
Firms looking to take advantage of this trend should consider prioritizing M&A expertise in talent searches. Job seekers, likewise, should be amassing and highlighting this experience.
On a similar front, 2025 figures to see a continued expansion of special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and thematic exchange-traded funds (ETFs). In particular, clean energy and the technology sector more broadly continue to be hotbeds for growth in these vehicles, driving demand for specialists in securities, compliance, and capital markets transactions.
The National Law Review has highlighted the rise in SPAC initial private offerings (IPOs), along with thematic ETFs and strong equities markets as a whole, as the #1 biggest trend to watch in capital markets heading into 2025.3 As with M&A value, this is a continuation of 2024’s momentum, and the biggest impact is likely to be felt in the first three quarters of the year. Firms should prioritize recruiting and hiring top talent in these areas soon and often.
Yet another financially focused trend impacting legal hiring in 2025 is the evolving regulatory landscape for digital assets. Regulators have been slow to develop and enforce uniform rules regarding crypto and the blockchain, but that is likely to change in the near future.
The new Executive Order “Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology” seeks to strengthen the structures around crypto assets. In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rescinded Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 and announced a new crypto task force. Experts have noted that these changes suggest a seemingly counter-intuitive wave of support for but heavy regulation of the crypto industry.4
These are largely uncharted waters, so firms may want to navigate them with professionals well-versed in digital assets and compliance at the helm—or at least somewhere on deck.
Recent shakeups to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives in the US are almost certain to impact multi-national corporations and other global concerns.
In particular, the SEC’s Climate Rule, finalized in 2024, is almost certain to be rescinded or otherwise defanged by the incoming administration. With it will likely go much of the SEC’s intention and ability to create and enforce regulations for ESG, human capital reporting, and related interests.5 However, many of these initiatives would have brought ESG regulations in the US more in line with their counterparts in other parts of the world, such as the European Union’s (EU) Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). And, since many US-based multinational corporations will be impacted by other global laws nonetheless, the whirlwind of what applies where and to whom will likely create confusion across the corporate landscape.
The upshot for legal hiring is that, as with the niche areas of specialization above, firms will likely be looking for candidates with expertise in international ESG compliance.
Tax policies are set to change in a couple of major ways in 2025. To an extent, they were going to change regardless of the outcome of the 2024 election, as this year was always the cutoff for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA). And, although the Internal Revenue Service has been forthcoming with its intentions, financial and legal experts of all stripes have been predicting an air of uncertainty across personal and corporate taxes in 2025 at least.6
Any upcoming changes to capital gains tax structures are of particular interest to large law firms, as these can influence investment behaviors and the market more broadly.
All of these shifts may manifest as increased opportunities for tax attorneys, even at firms that may not have employed such specialists (or as many of them) in-house in the past.
On a different level, the logistics and approaches that firms use for hiring are also likely to see an overhaul in 2025. Since the breakout of stable, scalable artificial intelligence (AI) in 2022-2023, businesses in every industry have been looking for new ways to leverage it.
Aside from automation and leveraging generative tools for ideating and drafting, many law firms are now using AI-driven tools to streamline hiring and identify top talent.
For firms looking to take advantage of this tool, caution and intentionality are key. Knowing when and how to use AI effectively will help mitigate inherent concerns with bias, model accuracy, and more. And, for candidates, this is an excellent time to both garner and communicate experience with AI, machine learning (ML), and other leading-edge tech.
In 2025, we’re far enough away from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic that the onset and continuation of remote and hybrid work have become a thing of the past for some firms.
However, hybrid flexibility in legal teams remains a top priority for many candidates.
Firms offering flexible arrangements and work-life balance will have a recruiting advantage over those that mandate staff to be on-premise most or all of the time. For firms with work cultures that revolve heavily around attendance in-office, it may be wise to consider ways to open up hybrid roles or arrangements (i.e., seasonal hybridity) for applicants and current personnel. If work could be performed remotely, refusing professionals the ability to may cost firms down the line—top talent may seek out a competitor who’s more WFH-friendly.
Last but not least, law firms will continue to leverage the best available data to make hiring decisions in 2025. This is an advantage to both firms and candidates, as objective analysis of the available recruitment analytics can lead to hiring the best talent fairly and transparently.
This last trend also ties in with many of the others above. If firms are seeking expertise in a specific legal niche, such as M&As or international ESG compliance, they can control for these things with carefully defined algorithms—or search terms and manual sorting.
Additionally, firms can cross-reference information about current candidates or recent hires with databases of other legal professionals. Doing so can empower management to predict how a professional with specific qualities may fare over time, based on how comparable individuals have fared in similar circumstances. As AI-powered predictive models grow in complexity, the power to sketch out the future and adjust accordingly will follow suit.
As these trends illustrate, the legal hiring landscape is likely to undergo major changes in 2025. However, many of these shifts are more about scope or emphasis rather than an about-face from how things were in 2024. What remains true, for both firms and legal job seekers alike, is that adaptability is essential to effective legal recruiting and placement.
E.P. Dine helps firms and candidates embrace change and prepare for success in the short and long term. We help firms find the best talent and talent find the best fit for them.
Get in touch today to learn more about our legal recruitment solutions today.
Sources:
At E.P. Dine, we are committed to delivering content that is not only relevant and insightful but also rooted in professional integrity and expertise. To achieve this, every article published on the E.P. Dine blog undergoes a meticulous review process by qualified professionals with deep knowledge and experience in the legal field and legal recruitment.
.png)
.png)
