Two out of five in-house legal departments expect to boost their headcount before the end of the year.
Expansion is being driven by a demand to bring more finance and regulatory work in-house rather than using external firms, according to recruiter Laurence Simons and the Association of Corporate Counsel, which jointly commissioned the EMEA Legal Department Benchmarking Survey 2013.
More than half of departments said they would bring regulatory issues in-house this year compared with less than a third in 2012. Popular areas to bring in-house include insurance and reinsurance, banking and finance, restructuring and insolvency, and tax.
Some 86% manage their own corporate and commercial work in-house, while 64% manage their own bribery, corruption and compliance work and 55% manage their own intellectual property work.
