26 Aug New Life for Legal Support
The month of August has seen the Legal Support and Shared Services job market in Sydney continued to come back to life, off the back of the professional market continuing to make a strong return in a variety of practice areas, in particular the Insurance, Construction, Disputes and Employment practices. Whilst the market kept an eye out for a second wave, the Legal Support roles that were put on hold in March become more urgent as teams returned to the “new norm” in respect to workflow, creating a demand for those roles that have been vacant over COVID to be filled.
We believe that this slow and steady return is a trend that will continue and that we will see other shared service needs appear in the market again in September and October, respectively, subject to NSW managing to keep the second wave at bay.
While the job opportunities will continue to steadily grow, understandably the candidate market in Sydney remains tight. Many firms managed to avoid making volume redundancies and those who were keen to hear about opportunities pre-pandemic are now more cautious about making a move, so the pool of strong legal secretaries looking for new opportunities remains limited.
Candidates who remain keen to hear about opportunities have indicated it will not just be strong salaries they are demanding, but greater flexibility to WFH on a more on-going basis, and confirmation around the firm’s technology and what policies are in place, should another lockdown occur in the future.
Many law firms pushed their salary reviews back and have indicated they will aim to do them in November, and we expect that in late September these reviews will be confirmed and locked in. Although we aren’t expecting these reviews to be significant enough to change the minds of candidates keen to explore the market and more likely to be a general wage growth increase of 2.4% to 3%. We will hopefully be able to present a clearer indication of what candidates can expect in next month’s update.
If you would like market and or salary information around a specific role or to hear about current opportunities, please do not hesitate to contact Sommer Bath on +61 2 8381 0730.
