Over the past decade, the marketplace or talent platform model has reshaped how we live and work—from transportation, food delivery and travel through to engineering, design, consulting and now, legal.

A group of Harvard Business School professors and researchers and Boston Consulting Group consultants recently wrote about this evolution for the Harvard Business Review. "[A] new generation of talent platforms—such as Catalant, InnoCentive, Kaggle, Toptal, and Upwork—has emerged. In contrast to Uber…these platforms offer on-demand access to highly skilled workers," they wrote.

Companies are combating growing talent and workforce issues by strategically engaging these platform providers, according to Joseph Fuller, Manjari Raman, Allison Bailey and Nithya Vaduganathan, by "seeking help with projects that are short- and long-term, tactical and strategic, specialized and general."