JD SUPRA — 2021 was a year like no other in legal recruiting. Law firms found themselves locked in a battle to recruit and retain lawyers in all practices, particularly in corporate and litigation. In addition, the in-house market has experienced a hiring frenzy of its own. Companies, in virtually all industries, need to hire more lawyers, creating additional competition for law firms in talent war. These changes would have taken at least a decade to cement in place, but they arrived due to the pandemic in record time. It is unlikely that huge shifts in behavior will occur in 2022 without such a push. Our Jobs Program, which monitors more than 1000 law firms and 24 fortune 500 companies, hit a new high for legal openings in January 2022 reaching 12,000 open legal jobs. That is a 300% increase from July 2020.