It's been a busy year for legal tech companies raising significant funding and acquiring competitors. But when companies merge, employees at all levels wait with bated breath for redundancy rounds that could cut their job.

"Everyone knows," said John Tredennick, former CEO of e-discovery company Catalyst before it was acquired by OpenText in January. "You can't go in and buy a company and expect employees will stay around. Your biggest worry is many of those employees are polishing up their résumés  when the [merger] rumors hit."

Employees updating their résumé may have good reason. Legal tech recruiters said cutting employees with similar roles after a merger is common, but some ex-employees' skills are viable across the legal industry and beyond.

Legal tech recruiters noted duplicate administrative, secretarial, sales and accounting staff are most likely to be cut after mergers because, although the company is acquiring new services or products, not all the combined staff is needed to get the job done.

"Whenever two companies combine, someone at the heart of this is thinking about how they can drive revenue with fewer people," Tredennick noted.

While the road back to employment is never easy, legal tech employees do gain valuable professional skills that are viable in different sectors of legal and outside of the industry.

"If they are in operations, they can transfer to another vendor, law firm or corporate legal setting. Their familiarity with rules and laws, adhering to deadlines makes it easier to transfer into those other types of companies," said Litigation Support Careers Inc. president and founder David Netzer.

He added, "Obviously there are sometimes not enough positions to go around, you can see those type of people transferring into other industries as well."

Indeed, legal staffing and consulting solutions firm Robert Half Legal executive director Jamy Sullivan noted, "If an individual has exposure within cybersecurity, data privacy and regulatory compliance that is all at the forefront." An employee with technical knowledge and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) accreditation, she added, "is in hot demand."

To be sure, the software developer may have the safest position after an acquisition, partly because their work creates the product. But when modules are discontinued and the acquired developers' software isn't needed, those developers might be cut, Tredennick added, and they may land in a tech industry that is light-years ahead of the legal tech space.

"There is nothing different about legal technology than other technology except many legal tech companies are running software that is 10 years in the past. Not all, but many," Tredennick said.

Tredennick advised what many legal recruiters echoed: "Develop your brand and skills. If you do that in most of these fields, if not all of them, you are going to have a lot of opportunity."