As a leading flexible legal talent provider, Paragon’s unique vantage point revealed a consistent throughline for 2025: momentum layered with caution. While the year didn’t deliver total clarity, it proved that hiring never stopped, it simply became more selective and tied to high-stakes initiatives.
Ultimately, 2025 reinforced a shift toward intentionality. Clients consistently prioritized candidates with highly analogous industry experience and the technological agility to deliver immediate value amid uncertainty. This report examines these trends in detail, reflecting both Paragon’s strongest year to date and the strategic priorities legal teams are carrying into 2026.
Demand for Paragon’s flexible legal talent remained strong throughout 2025, reflecting both increased client reliance and the continued expansion of Paragon’s market reach. Over the course of the year, overall demand rose, underscoring the increasingly central role flexible legal talent plays as legal teams manage workload volatility, regulatory complexity, and ongoing business transformation.
Capital and talent were prioritized for the functions most critical to maintaining operational stability and driving long-term growth. As a result, Paragon’s five busiest practice areas for attorneys were:
In addition to those core areas of focus, we observed steady demand for General Corporate (including Interim General Counsel), Compliance & Regulatory, Commercial Contracts (Manufacturing & Industrial Industries), and Securities attorneys. These core drivers of demand remained remarkably consistent with 2024 trends. The notable outlier was trade-related compliance, which saw a distinct moment early in the year fueled by tariff anxiety. However, this momentum proved temporary as the anticipated workload either failed to materialize or could be effectively managed by external firms.
Contracts managers and legal operations professionals accounted for roughly 20% of new project requests throughout the year, also consistent with previous years’ demand.
Demand in 2025 was broad-based across industries, with several sectors showing especially strong and consistent activity. The year’s primary demand drivers were concentrated in:
The concentration of demand across our top sectors was driven by an urgent need for specialized expertise to navigate a high-stakes 2025. This was not just about “extra hands”—it was about a strategic “deploy-now” mentality to address specific market pressures.
Ultimately, these industries led the year because they faced immediate, high-stakes challenges that required the plug-and-play agility that only a highly targeted interim model provides.
Flexibility remained a defining feature of client demand in 2025. Nearly 90% of Paragon’s roles were remote, with just 5% of roles requiring in-office presence 5 days per week.
Notably, even as RTO mandates become more prevalent for permanent headcount, most clients remain content to engage contractors on a remote basis. This allows legal teams to access a much deeper national talent pool while limiting overhead and physical footprint.
In 2025, we continued to see clients lean into the primary selling point of interim legal talent – flexibility. Of the engagements requested through Paragon
This distribution suggests legal departments are effectively utilizing the flex model to pay strictly for the capacity they need. However, it is worth noting that while part-time structures offer budgetary efficiency, roles that provide consistent hours and clear expectations continue to attract the most elite talent.
The 2025 talent market was characterized by high saturation and increased client leverage. Legal professionals seeking permanent roles often found the search process taking six months or longer, far exceeding historical expectations.
While demand for commercial attorneys was high, clients were reluctant to consider candidates with experience outside environments analogous to their own. Industry experience is now the baseline requirement. Many clients prioritized candidates who could demonstrate immediate fluency in industry-specific regulations, risk appetites, key counterparties, and niche agreement types.
Rates have stabilized significantly from 2022 highs, showing little movement over the past twelve months. Yes, some specialized roles commanded a premium (most notably seen in Interim GC roles, privacy & cybersecurity, and the financial practices), but for most legal professionals, rates remained stagnant.
Work arrangements remain a point of friction in the market. Despite a growing RTO mandates, our data shows that clients are not paying a premium for in-office or hybrid requirements. While candidates often find the lack of a “commute premium” off-putting, many organizations remained firm on these requirements without adjusting compensation upward to account for them.
2025 was a milestone year for Paragon. Strong market demand translated into record outcomes, underscoring our ability to provide elite legal talent at scale while maintaining the quality and speed that a volatile market requires.
As we move into 2026, the throughline of intentionality is expected to evolve into a mandate for operational precision. While the macro-regulatory landscape remains difficult to forecast, several structural shifts in the legal talent market are already clear.
In a largely candidate-saturated market, the pay spikes of previous years have leveled off, and we do not anticipate meaningful upward movement in 2026. While specialized practices will continue to command a premium, generalist compensation is expected to remain flat as clients leverage high talent availability to maintain budget discipline.
Clients are engaging with AI and legal technology at an unprecedented pace, and the ability of attorneys to embrace and master new tools quickly is now a non-negotiable requirement. The unpleasant reality is that meaningful AI deployment is only as good as the underlying data. For most organizations, gathering data and synthesizing precedent feels far from the flash of promised AI outputs. This work will require significant time and hands-on expertise from seasoned contracts management and legal operations professionals.
Legal teams are expected to navigate more matters than ever including AI governance, cybersecurity, immigration, and crisis management. Success in this environment requires strong project management skills and the ability to “figure it out” even with incomplete information.
We do not anticipate a reversion to pre-Covid in-office requirements but expect to see an increase in the number of companies requiring hybrid schedules for project-employees. Clients are increasingly firm on these requirements, but largely unwilling to pay a premium for them. Navigating this gap will be a challenge in 2026.
As we head into the new year, the most successful legal teams won’t just be the ones with the biggest budgets, but the ones with the most intentional and flexible approach to talent.
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