For years, Big Law has cut its librarian and research staff, as it moved to smaller offices and cut the space for libraries. Now, for the first time in several years, law firms are pouring more resources and money into such roles—but it’s likely not for books.
The “greatest shake-up” in law firm staffing over the last year has been in library and research roles, which saw the largest surge in pay and number of heads relative to other law firm staff roles, according to a recent report from Thomson Reuters.
Library and research roles had been on the downslope, with a ratio of staff to lawyers declining and cost per lawyer growing slowly, the report noted. Yet in a reversal last year, they led the way in growth, with costs per lawyer escalating by 12.9% and FTEs per lawyer growing by 5.3%. None of the other 10 categories featured in the data got up to 10% growth in costs per lawyer, and only the “recruiting and talent” category saw equal growth in FTEs per lawyer.
The category, as spelled out in the Thomson Reuters data, mostly consists of legal research, library and research management, knowledge management and library clerk roles.
“What may be happening is that the growth in knowledge management and library & research management roles is in preparation for increased use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools,” the report stated. “As firms get their data in order, they start to gather and clean the training data that they will soon be using with AI workflows. The elevated cost-per-lawyer growth that comes from these advancements is already evident as firms’ research tools require a more sophisticated set of skills to fully be utilized.”
Although firms up and down the Am Law 200 have repeatedly emphasized AI exploration over the last couple of years, some analysts have suggested the legal industry might be at a disadvantage when it comes to hiring talent in this area.
Indeed, Marcus Belanger, the analyst and author of the Thomson Reuters staffing report, said in an interview this week that while he hasn’t seen concrete data on that specific claim yet, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence about the “second-class citizen culture at law firms they talk about. So, that general feeling of, ‘our work is secondary to what the lawyers are doing, and we’re treated as such.’
“I think that’s not a long-term strategy that’s going to work,” Belanger added. “But compensation can cure a lot of ills.” Additionally, he pointed out that the growth in AI-related roles in law firms has come at the same time that big companies in other industries that employ such professionals have done layoffs.
“Maybe it’s not coincidental that all this growth is happening at the same time there’s been a contraction on that side in tech and finance,” he said.
Belanger added that, while he’d be “shocked” if library and research roles saw a similar level of growth this year, 2023 “was kind of a pivot year,” and there will likely be either minimal declines or moderate increases in compensation for those roles moving forward.
Other categories of law firm staffing featured and tallied in the report include recruiting and talent; practice group operations; executive management; marketing and business development; and finance, among others. Each of those categories had higher average annual growth in cost per lawyer and FTEs per lawyer than library and research or IT in the six years leading up to 2023.
But only recruiting and talent saw a similar increase (5.3%) in FTEs per lawyer relative to library and research in 2023.
One caveat, however, is that library and research roles still only make up about 2.5% of total support staff at law firms. That’s the second-lowest proportion among the staff functions analyzed by Thomson Reuters. Though in a long-term decline, secretarial and word processing roles still lead the way on a proportional basis (28%), followed by operations (16%), IT and technology (14%), and finance (12%), among others.
IT was the third-fastest growing support staff role on an FTE per lawyer basis (2.3%) in 2023 and the sixth-fastest growing in terms of costs-per-lawyer (6.7%), the report stated. And given its larger base within firms on average, that growth “could be considered to be more indicative of where firm priorities lie given that year-over-year growth is expected to be less impacted by outlier firms or favorable baselines from the previous year,” the report stated.
“What we saw in 2023 within IT & tech staff once again tells us that firms are investing in higher-paid professionals with more advanced skills.”
Belanger noted that beneath the IT umbrella, “networks and security” professionals within firms saw only a 1.1% increase in FTEs per lawyer, but a 6.1% increase in cost per lawyer. “The difference between those two points is essentially their compensation growth. That’s getting paid per head by quite a bit more,” he said.
The report concluded that trend in “rapid” compensation growth is expected to continue as firms adopt cloud-based infrastructure and bring GenAI into the fold more frequently.
“Security, for instance, is quickly becoming one of the top operational priorities for many law firms, and it is very likely that this will result in these roles being increasingly well paid,” the report stated.