Our own tenth anniversary has given us pause to reflect on the huge distance travelled by so-called ‘new law’ offerings in the last decade. Arguably, evolution in the legal profession has never been swifter, with changes to people, process and technology all having a significant impact. From our position, we’ve been able to track the changing needs of legal teams by how they use contract lawyers.

At the beginning, it was all about plugging a gap in a team; someone would be on holiday or on a period of extended sick leave, or there would be a particularly time-intensive project on the horizon which required more people power. Those teams would draft in a contract lawyer to help support them and pick up the slack, but it was often just an ad hoc requirement.