The hiring environment has been good to legal departments over the past two years and is about to get even better.

According to the 2006 Altman Weil Law Department Metrics Benchmarking Survey, lawyer staffing in corporate law departments rose by 19 percent in 2005. The key measure–lawyers per billion dollars of revenue–went from 2.93 lawyers/billion in 2004 to 3.49 lawyers/billion in 2005.

Although few metrics exist to track 2006's hiring environment, legal recruiter Mike Evers, president of Evers Legal Search in Chicago, says legal departments may have stagnated in terms of growth this year, but still managed to avoid downsizing.

“The hiring environment has been solid,” Evers says. “There's not been a lot of growth in terms of head count, but I didn't hear the dreaded words 'hiring freeze' either.”

Part of the reason general counsel have avoided eliminating positions is because their departments are already as bare-bones as can be.

“In-house legal departments have hit their low thresholds,” Evers says. “They are as leanly staffed as they can be. So GCs aren't getting a lot of pushback from the business people when filling vacancies.”

2007 is looking even better. Rather than maintaining the status quos, Evers projects that legal departments will create new positions, thanks in part to an increase in revenues across corporate America.

“As revenues are generally growing, the handcuffs are going to come off in a lot of legal departments,” Evers says.

To test this premise, InsideCounsel is conducting an anonymous survey of its readers on their hiring and staffing practices. The survey will take just five minutes to complete.

Your answers to this survey will help provide the in-house community with a comprehensive overview of critical in-house hiring practices and plans. We will publish the results of this survey in an article in our March 2007 issue.

To take the survey, click here or go to www.insidecounsel.com/editorial_survey.