Our Legal, Risk & Compliance Managing Director, Sunny Everton shares his thoughts below on private practice market conditions, salary changes, hiring trends, what firms need to implement in 2026 to attract top talent and how professionals can enhance their career prospects. For support with your hiring or career goal needs, contact Sunny who will be happy to offer advice.
What hiring trends are you seeing across this market?
Hiring across the UK legal market remains steady but increasingly selective, with organisations focusing on roles and skill sets that sit closest to revenue generation, regulatory change, and risk management. Demand is strongest for lawyers and governance professionals working in commercial contracts, corporate and M&A, regulatory and compliance, data privacy, litigation, legal technology, and insurance-specific disciplines, such as claims and coverage.
In-house teams are being asked to do more with a leaner headcount, so naturally businesses are prioritising individuals who can combine strong technical skills with commercial judgment and the ability to influence decision-making. This is particularly true for candidates with highly specialised commercial, corporate, digital, and regulatory experience, who are often able to command premium salaries. To secure and retain this talent, employers are being pushed to review their overall proposition from base salary and bonus, through to hybrid working, career development and wider benefits. Importantly they are being encouraged to think more holistically about total reward rather than relying on headline pay alone.
How are market conditions and geopolitical tensions impacting the employment market?
Across the compliance and company secretarial functions, hiring remains resilient despite a challenging macroeconomic backdrop. Persistent inflation, higher interest rates, geopolitical tensions, and ongoing supply chain disruption have forced organisations to re-evaluate costs and restructure teams. This has increased expectations on governance, compliance, and company secretarial professionals to deliver more value with fewer resources. Subsequently, this has driven a more strategic and cost-conscious approach to resourcing. In this environment, there is a sharper focus on governance quality, board support, and the ability to operate efficiently in complex, regulated environments. At the same time, diversity, equity, and inclusion have become more prominent themes across governance and company secretarial teams. Organisations are increasingly aware of the commercial benefits of diverse boards and leadership, and are implementing targeted efforts to attract, retain and develop talent from a wider range of backgrounds.
How is technology and AI affecting legal practice across the legal sector?
The rise of generative AI is beginning to reshape the governance, legal and company secretarial landscape. For in-house legal teams and company secretaries, AI offers clear opportunities to streamline board reporting, improve document and knowledge management, automate routine tasks, and strengthen insight around risk, compliance, and performance. However, it also introduces new questions around accountability, data protection, ethics, and regulatory expectations. Governance professionals and legal leaders are therefore being asked not only to understand how AI can be deployed safely and effectively, but also to design frameworks for responsible adoption, including appropriate oversight, auditability, and control. Those who can bridge the gap between technology, legal risk and board-level governance are likely to be particularly sought after in the next phase of market development.
What talent and skills are in-demand?
Regulatory and compliance commercial awareness
In the insurance sector specifically, risk and compliance functions are operating in a regulation-first environment, which is reshaping both hiring needs and the characteristics of successful candidates. The continued implementation and embedding of Consumer Duty has required insurers to look more closely at product governance, fair value, distribution chains, and customer outcomes. This has created a steady flow of both project and business-as-usual work, but it has also driven greater selectivity in hiring. Businesses are seeking professionals who can go beyond interpreting rules and can instead design and implement practical frameworks, policies and controls that work day-to-day and stand up to regulatory scrutiny. Alongside this, ongoing scrutiny from UK regulators has raised expectations around risk frameworks, governance, and board oversight, particularly at senior levels. Candidates who can ‘speak regulator’, work confidently with data and management information, and hold their own with Boards and executive teams are particularly in high demand.
Environmental, social and governance knowledge and expertise
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors and climate risk have now moved from presentation slides into concrete risk categories. Insurers are being challenged to think about climate exposure across underwriting, investments and disclosure, and to demonstrate how sustainability considerations are reflected in risk appetite, capital allocation, and reporting. This shift is generating demand for risk and compliance professionals who can connect climate and ESG issues with regulation and with the practical realities of policy design, risk frameworks, and reporting. At the same time, claims inflation, social inflation and increasingly complex reinsurance and delegated authority structures are sharpening the focus on underwriting controls, policy wordings, and counterparty risk. Risk teams are expected to understand not just the policy library, but the economic reality of portfolios and the commercial consequences of risk decisions.
Digital transformation and technical expertise
Digital transformation is another important driver. Many insurers are modernising at pace, which brings outsourcing, cloud, data privacy, algorithmic decision-making, and AI governance squarely into the remit of risk and compliance. Candidates with experience in data governance, outsourcing and third-party risk, operational resilience or AI-related controls often stand out and can justify a premium. The net result for risk and compliance hiring is a market where there is plenty of work, steady underlying demand, and a noticeable lengthening of decision-making processes. Employers are prioritising candidates who can combine regulatory understanding with commercial pragmatism and comfort with technology and data and are willing to wait for those profiles rather than make compromises.
Disputes and claims understanding
Disputes, claims and coverage remain central to the risk profile and profitability of insurance businesses. Claims, coverage, and wordings are where financial impact and regulatory scrutiny frequently converge, and in-house teams need lawyers who understand policy interpretation, coverage disputes, reinsurance structures, and litigation risk. The ability to work closely with claims, underwriting, and external counsel to manage these exposures is critical. Within in-house legal, claims has historically been a stable and somewhat overlooked area of hiring. That stability remains, but claims legal has become far more central to insurers’, managing general agents’ and brokers’ governance, customer, and regulatory strategies.
Mergers and Acquisitions experience
In-house legal teams in insurance are also busy with ongoing merger and acquisition activity, consolidation, and structural change. Run-off deals, legacy portfolio disposals, international group reorganisations and intra-group arrangements all generate steady work for lawyers with transactional and corporate reorganisation experience. Even when headline M&A volumes fluctuate, this structural work tends to persist. In parallel, insurers’ expansion into digital distribution, embedded insurance, data analytics, and AI continues to generate demand for legal counsel who are comfortable with data protection, IT and outsourcing agreements, algorithmic decision-making, intellectual property, and vendor risk. Lawyers who can combine commercial contracts expertise with a strong understanding of data, technology and digital business models are particularly attractive.
Are you seeing more lawyers move from private practice to in-house roles?
For lawyers in private practice, the bar for moving in-house into insurers has risen beyond simply being a technically capable adviser. Hiring managers increasingly look for lawyers who already think and operate like in-house counsel. This means moving from advising on rules to designing frameworks that determine how those rules work in practice. Lawyers who have been involved in drafting policies, frameworks, and governance documents, such as product governance frameworks, board papers, delegations, and terms of reference are often viewed more favourably than those whose experience is limited to transactional documents and opinions. The ability to think in terms of implementation rather than purely analysis is another important differentiator. Running or contributing to implementation workshops, training sessions or change projects demonstrates that a lawyer can help embed regulatory change and legal risk management into business processes.