ANALYSIS: Futurist for Hire — Alt-Legal Jobs React to Recession

Thanks to changes in the industry, lawyers are filling more new and different types of “alternative legal” jobs than ever. But those jobs have taken a hit in this downturn and may be difficult to find, when compared to the apparent boom times of 2019. Despite this, there are still opportunities for lawyers willing to go outside of traditional practice in areas including e-discovery, legal operations, project management, compliance and privacy. Bloomberg Law turned to TRU's Jared Coseglia for his unique perspective on the legal tech job market.

"'From an employment perspective, generally, legal ops has been hit the hardest of all the alternate legal pathways.'

"Nonetheless, e-Discovery is 'a very stable, lucrative, competitive space where being a lawyer is advantageous,' Coseglia said. He believes hiring in this sector will pick up again as litigation resumes.

"'When we look at the biggest businesses in our culture — Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook — these are the businesses that are capitalizing on the availability and usage of all of our data,' Coseglia said. 'There’s great opportunity to make a lot of money on people’s information. And corporations are engaging privacy professionals not only to help them stay compliant, but to help them measure the business opportunity against the legal risk and have a voice in the business.'

"The Covid-19 crisis’s mixing of health care data with technology data (for example, through contact tracing apps) has 'quickly spiraled into job opportunities for all sorts of people in all sorts of different segments,' Coseglia said. 'Technology has been huge for privacy professionals. Health care has been good for privacy professionals. That intersection of both has been an incredibly hot area, and a lot of these people are lawyers.'

"Coseglia said his firm tracked more than 300 privacy openings in Q2 2020.

"Coseglia says he has seen more hiring for high-level roles, particularly in privacy, as organizations rethink their leadership post-pandemic."

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