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As the legal technology job market continues to grow steadily, employers are turning to a number of perks to attract new talent, according to a recent survey from legal consulting and recruiting company Special Counsel.

Special Counsel's 2019 Salary Guide, released last week, found that about half of all in-house departments (49 percent) and law firms (46 percent) offer employees the option to work from home or remotely. Similarly, nearly 50 percent of law firms offer paid paternity or maternity leave and 35 percent of in-house departments also offer paid leave.

Of course, this does not mean that these benefits are being offered in place of money. Average total cash compensation for those identifying as e-discovery counsel ($111,755), e-discovery attorneys ($111,217) and data privacy/information security analysts ($100,254) all topped six figures, while total cash compensation for chief information or technology officers average $271,650.

The guide was compiled in-house by Special Counsel from over 6,000 respondents in various law firm and in-house legal positions from 68 major cities across the U.S. The full report can be found on the company's website.

Nick Grimm, division director at SCI Legal Technology, told Legaltech News that the survey's findings were “spot on” with what his team expected. To him, it's no surprise that employers are looking to spruce up their hiring packages due to the complexity legal technology jobs entail.

For example, in hiring a training manager, he said, “if your goal is to find a trainer who not only understands the complex technologies, but who understands the environment of legal and of a law firm, there are only a handful out there.”

And those jobs are only becoming more prevalent. Grimm noted that many of his clients are now hiring “user experience champions,” intended to help shepherd implementation of new technologies throughout an organization.

“If you don't have everyone on board, it will fail. You'll be wasting money; it won't be used properly,” Grimm explained. “And so a lot of firms are having conversations about finding individuals who aren't necessarily coming from a hard IT background, but they have enough familiarity with the technology, coupled with communication skill sets, to really speak to the end user to push that technology forward.”

In general, he noted that legal industry salaries tend to be “just a tick behind corporate America” for some back-end positions such as software development and network engineering, making the variety of employee benefits unsurprising. He also said that legal teams are often looking to hire a different kind of candidate—one that enjoys the challenge of an emerging field.

“One of the great things that is happening in IT departments within the law firm setting is that they are becoming revenue generators,” Grimm said. “There are software applications being developed that create another revenue stream that isn't the normal attorney billable hour. The pitch there is that you're walking into an industry that's being transformed; you're going to be a part of that.”