By Michele Gorman

Law360 (October 6, 2020, 7:08 PM EDT) -- The outlook for hiring and job security generally looks brighter for in-house lawyers in certain sectors for the rest of 2020 — following an initial knee-jerk reaction to the pandemic earlier this year when many legal departments cut pay for general counsel or furloughed workers — though experts warn communication and planning for future uncertainties remain crucial.

Unlike their law firm peers, corporate counsel haven't uniformly dealt with the financial effects of the novel coronavirus — those in customer-facing industries have felt the pain a lot more than those whose businesses are more insulated from a downturn, such as companies in the technology and financial services industries, experts said.

But through conducting job searches and from conversations with others including CEOs and legal department hiring managers and candidates, Solutus Legal Search LLC founding partner Julie Brush said the in-house legal hiring market generally has been picking up steadily over the past 14 weeks.

"If you looked at the job boards back in May compared to now, it's an order of magnitude more active," she said. "You can look all over the U.S. and it's much more active today in hiring."

She added that there was a lull between March and June when most employers were dealing with "shock and change and trying to get their arms around what was happening."

But Brush and other legal industry experts acknowledged that organizations and their in-house teams are now more in control than they were when the pandemic first hit earlier this year.

These observations checked out in recent U.S. Department of Labor data. For the fifth straight month, the legal industry in September added jobs, as employment in the sector continued to inch up after a devastating plummet in the spring, the numbers released Friday show.

Looking to the rest of the year, Audrey Rubin, president of Rubin Solutions and a senior adviser at BarkerGilmore LLC, said she expects the law department progress to continue over the next three months.

"My opinion is that people had knee-jerk hysteria when COVID struck," Rubin said about legal departments. "Some used it as an excuse to make some cuts, probably where they might've made cuts anyway. But the panic should have settled by now."

While experts generally have a rosy outlook for in-house departments to close out the year, they also recognized that it could change, especially given the uncertainties surrounding next month's U.S. presidential election and the future of the coronavirus.

Despite the optimism, the legal industry has added an estimated 21,200 jobs over five months, which pales in comparison to the approximately 68,000 positions that were lost in April, according to Labor Bureau statistics.

Experts pointed out that in-house lawyers are seeing the job market bounce back more quickly to pre-pandemic levels than their peers at law firms — though the extent of the recovery depends on a lawyer's industry.

Certain sectors including retail, hospitality and transportation that took the brunt of the virus impact largely continue to suffer, and aren't actively growing their legal departments, experts said.

General counsel at Hilton Worldwide Inc., Macy's, The Cheesecake Factory and Walt Disney Co. were among the corporate executives shouldering pay reductions to share the pain and help their businesses stay afloat. In some cases, organizations had to make temporary changes to their in-house departments.

Still, other industries in the meantime have expanded, along with the importance of the in-house legal department.

Since the pandemic hit, members of other business units have called on their in-house counsel to answer questions and provide guidance on a variety of issues including employment, health, safety and privacy. In the background, general counsel and their teams have balanced legal and compliance risks that might arise with employees' concerns.

Many top corporate lawyers have found themselves juggling new duties, including being part of the company task forces focused on handling fallout from the pandemic. They are also adjusting to tougher-than-usual working conditions as they try to ensure as much business continuity as possible.

"Even if they're not necessarily going to be expanding in other verticals within their organization, legal is just growing in the level of importance and the critical nature of moving a company's business forward as well as protecting it," Brush said.

In her role, Brush said she sees technology as the most active market and the industry that will drive the recovery, not unlike what she witnessed following both the 2001 and 2008 economic downturns.

"The technology industry is not only resilient, but it's incredibly innovative," she said. "It takes global, larger, big-scale situations and it uses that innovative fabric that it has and it innovates, and that's what we're going to see now … to adapt to a very dynamic time."

Similarly, Rubin said companies in technology as well as financial services are thriving and at least planning to hire soon.

Brush also sees active in-house hiring in the startup market, as emerging-growth companies look to hire heads of legal roles. And some businesses that laid off staff earlier in the year and are now preparing for liquidity have made strategic hires to shepherd the organization through its initial public offering.

Across the board, there are several drivers contributing to the activity, including mobility as some lawyers leave their jobs because they moved or are overworked or emotionally overtaxed. Attorneys in-house tend to be overworked, even in normal times, said Chris Batz, senior recruiter and owner of The Lion Group LLC.

Another catalyst comes from companies that have an increased demand for their products and services, and as a result have expanded their legal departments. Those "high-flyers," as Brush called them, "were hiring up a storm and they were taking people — lawyers from other companies — and that was leaving holes in legal departments."

These various drivers, along with the greater value that most executives are placing on the legal function, have led to growth across in-house departments, experts said.

As the year nears its close, the uncertainty surrounding who will be the next leader of the United States could throw a wrench into that optimism for companies.

"That is bad for business, it's bad for the stock market and it's bad for [the] hiring of people's careers," Batz said.

In the meantime, he suggests lawyers invest time in updating their LinkedIn profiles and building relationships through networking.

Rubin encouraged general counsel to hold frequent and transparent conversations with their teams — not only about company-related matters but also to check in on employees' well-being. Now it's even more important to bring lawyers "on a call or on screen together so that they know they're part of something larger than themselves," she said.

She also suggested general counsel during the last quarter of the year should nail down a crisis procedure not unlike the contingency plan they hopefully have in place for other crises like a cyberattack or natural disaster. Creating one ahead of time allows the employees involved to think clearly through hypothetical situations before disaster strikes.

"Lawyers don't often have emergency plans or crisis plans or succession plans," Rubin said. "We kind of think everything will always be OK."

--Additional reporting by Kevin Penton. Editing by Emily Kokoll.

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