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Inside the Legal AI Talent Market: E-Discovery Professionals Are Moving Into Firmwide AI Integration
Editor’s Note: With this issue, we begin a new monthly column from TruStaffing CEO and longtime contributor to Cybersecurity Law & Strategy, Jared Coseglia: Inside the Legal AI Talent Market. Having analyzed the legal tech job market for over 15 years, Jared is uniquely positioned to report on a segment of the industry that is not often discussed in trade publications — the job market. In this first installment, Jared discusses his findings from Legalweek ’25.
Legalweek Takeaways: E-Discovery Professionals Are Moving Into Firmwide AI Integration
One of the most striking themes coming out of Legalweek 2025 was the clear shift in how law firms are beginning to operationalize generative AI — and who’s driving that transformation.
For decades, litigation support professionals have been a unique and vital part of law firm operations, often the only business unit outside of attorney billing that consistently built robust revenue, if not profit centers. That legacy is now laying the groundwork for something bigger: a redefinition of how law firms are leaning into e-discovery professionals to deploy generative AI technology across practice groups beyond litigation and e-discovery.
Electronic discovery professionals may no longer be siloed in litigation support. In practice areas like M&A, tax, IP and regulatory, innovation leaders are starting to think differently about who can help them with improving service delivery, augmenting human decision-making, leveraging generative AI technology and — perhaps most importantly — reshaping pricing models. Law firms are beginning to tap their litigation support and e-discovery leaders to help explore and integrate AI into broader legal workflows.
At the tactical level, there’s a wide divergence in how firms are structuring AI execution. Some are taking a centralized approach, by routing bespoke and wildly divergent generative AI request from partners to a business unit that can intake the request and provide guidance and resources to execute. For many firms in the Am Law 200, this linchpin is unofficially the litigation support group.
Other firms, however, are still decentralized — allowing practice group leaders and rainmakers to spin up their own talent ecosystems within their practice separate from resource allocation throughout the firm. These projects are frequently tailored to specific client relationships, and in some cases, supported by data scientists or technologists hired directly by the partner. This model presents challenges with scalability and potentially repeatability should a practice group experience talent attrition from their dedicated data scientist or technologist.
The simplest, most cost-effective, and scalable use of talent for these kinds of project, whether a law firms’ model is centralized or decentralized, is by augmenting with fractional contract resources.
Law firms remain cautious about spending top dollar on AI experts and execution, while use cases are still largely evolving. Areas edging closer to commoditization — like contract lifecycle management (CLM) and contract analytics — provide opportunity for more voluminous hiring of generative AI talent in legal as projects move away from a bespoke nature and toward more repeatable solutions.
As generative AI projects multiply inside firms, success will depend not just on software — but on assembling the right mix of people to build, pilot, and iterate.
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Major Differences In UK, U.S. Copyright Laws
This article highlights how copyright law in the United Kingdom differs from U.S. copyright law, and points out differences that may be crucial to entertainment and media businesses familiar with U.S law that are interested in operating in the United Kingdom or under UK law. The article also briefly addresses contrasts in UK and U.S. trademark law.
The Article 8 Opt In
The Article 8 opt-in election adds an additional layer of complexity to the already labyrinthine rules governing perfection of security interests under the UCC. A lender that is unaware of the nuances created by the opt in (may find its security interest vulnerable to being primed by another party that has taken steps to perfect in a superior manner under the circumstances.
Strategy vs. Tactics: Two Sides of a Difficult Coin
With each successive large-scale cyber attack, it is slowly becoming clear that ransomware attacks are targeting the critical infrastructure of the most powerful country on the planet. Understanding the strategy, and tactics of our opponents, as well as the strategy and the tactics we implement as a response are vital to victory.
Legal Possession: What Does It Mean?
Possession of real property is a matter of physical fact. Having the right or legal entitlement to possession is not "possession," possession is "the fact of having or holding property in one's power." That power means having physical dominion and control over the property.
The Stranger to the Deed Rule
In 1987, a unanimous Court of Appeals reaffirmed the vitality of the "stranger to the deed" rule, which holds that if a grantor executes a deed to a grantee purporting to create an easement in a third party, the easement is invalid. Daniello v. Wagner, decided by the Second Department on November 29th, makes it clear that not all grantors (or their lawyers) have received the Court of Appeals' message, suggesting that the rule needs re-examination.