Jointly developed by eLawCareers and UOLLB, the Global Legal Hiring Index (GLHI) provides a city-by-city assessment of legal recruitment activity worldwide, offering a new perspective on the geographical distribution of legal employment opportunities.
The legal profession is international in its reach, but legal employment opportunities are not distributed evenly across the world. Some cities have established themselves as major centres of legal recruitment, while others maintain smaller but active legal employment markets.
Understanding where legal hiring activity is concentrated, and how it changes over time, provides a valuable perspective on the geographical landscape of the legal profession.
To help provide this insight, eLawCareers and UOLLB have jointly established the world's first Global Legal Hiring Index (GLHI), a new index designed to measure and compare legal recruitment activity across cities worldwide.
Using the legal recruitment data from eLawCareers, the GLHI ranks cities according to the number of advertised legal job opportunities recorded in each location. It provides a straightforward, data-based measure of the relative scale of legal hiring activity across different international markets.
The objective is to establish a consistent reference point for understanding where legal recruitment is taking place and how different cities compare in terms of advertised legal employment opportunities.
How Does the Global Legal Hiring Index Work?
The methodology behind the GLHI is based on the legal recruitment activity recorded for each city in the eLawCareers dataset.
Each city receives a numerical rating corresponding to its number of advertised legal vacancies. The higher the number of recorded jobs, the higher the city's rating and its position in the ranking.
This approach allows cities to be compared using a common measurement, making the index relatively straightforward to understand and interpret.
The dataset covers hundreds of cities across numerous countries and geographical regions. It includes major international legal centres, national capitals, financial hubs and smaller regional cities.
Rather than focusing exclusively on a limited number of internationally recognised legal markets, the GLHI seeks to provide a wider geographical picture of legal recruitment activity.
A Measure of Legal Recruitment Activity
An important feature of the GLHI is that it will be updated regularly.
The international legal recruitment market is continually changing. Hiring requirements fluctuate, law firms expand or restructure their operations, and demand for legal professionals varies between geographical markets.
An up-to-date index provides an opportunity to monitor these developments and observe changes in recruitment activity over time.
Through regular updates, users will be able to follow the rankings of individual cities and identify changes in their respective levels of advertised legal vacancies.
As the index accumulates historical data, it will also provide a basis for examining longer-term recruitment patterns and the changing geographical distribution of legal employment opportunities.
The intention is not simply to produce a one-off ranking, but to establish an ongoing indicator of legal hiring activity around the world.
Why Is a Global Legal Hiring Index Important?
Recruitment activity is an important dimension of any professional services market. The number of advertised legal positions in a city provides an indication of the level of recruitment activity taking place in that location.
For law firms, legal recruiters and legal professionals, understanding the geographical distribution of hiring opportunities can offer useful market intelligence.
The GLHI is intended to serve several purposes:
For law firms: Providing a comparative perspective on legal recruitment activity across different cities and markets.
For legal recruiters: Offering an additional reference point for identifying locations with higher concentrations of advertised legal vacancies.
For legal professionals: Helping to illustrate the geographical distribution of legal employment opportunities.
For researchers and market observers: Providing a consistent dataset through which changes in legal hiring activity can be monitored over time.
By bringing recruitment data together in a single comparative framework, the GLHI aims to make the international legal employment market easier to observe and understand.
It is important to recognise that the index measures advertised legal vacancies recorded in the eLawCareers dataset. It does not seek to measure the total number of practising lawyers, the overall size of a city's legal sector or the number of positions ultimately filled.
Its focus is specifically on legal hiring activity.
The Relationship Between GLHI and the Global Legal Cities Index (GLCI)
The establishment of the Global Legal Hiring Index is also part of a broader initiative to refine the Global Legal Cities Index (GLCI).
The GLCI is intended to provide a wider framework for evaluating and comparing cities as international legal centres, using a range of indicators that reflect different aspects of their legal markets.
Within this broader framework, the GLHI is intended to become one of the component indices underpinning the GLCI in the coming assessment.
While the GLHI concentrates specifically on legal recruitment activity, its future incorporation into the GLCI will contribute an important employment and talent dimension to the assessment of international legal cities.
The development of the GLCI recognises that the position of a city as a legal centre cannot be understood through a single measure alone. Different indicators are needed to capture the various characteristics and activities that contribute to its standing within the international legal profession.
Legal recruitment is one such dimension. The geographical concentration of advertised legal opportunities provides an additional perspective on the activity and development of legal markets.
The GLHI will therefore serve two purposes: operating as an independent ranking of global legal hiring activity, while also providing a data component for the future development of the GLCI.
Looking Ahead
The launch of the Global Legal Hiring Index marks a significant step towards developing a more systematic understanding of the geographical distribution of legal employment opportunities around the world.
Jointly developed by eLawCareers and UOLLB, the index brings together recruitment data and an international comparative framework to provide a recurring assessment of legal hiring activity.
With regular updates, the GLHI will build an evolving picture of legal recruitment across hundreds of cities, helping to identify where opportunities are concentrated and how the international legal employment landscape changes over time.
As the wider Global Legal Cities Index develops, the GLHI will also contribute to a broader, multi-dimensional assessment of the world's legal centres.
The Global Legal Hiring Index is therefore not simply a ranking of cities by the number of legal vacancies. It is a developing measure of the geographical dynamics of the international legal employment market and an important building block in the future assessment of global legal cities.