News Digest: The September hiring crunch, a $1.5B copyright bill, and Congress's AI kill switch

This week's digest with the latest Legal.io trends, insights, and updates to help you navigate your legal career.

Happy Friday!

In the first half of this year, the three roles teams came to us for most were Commercial Counsel, Paralegal, and Legal Operations.

Interestingly, about 10% of that volume was Bring Your Own Talent: teams who already had a candidate and just needed us to vet, onboard, and manage them.

Planning to source talent yourself and catch the September Hiring Surge? You'll want to start now:

Scope and calibrate the role
Build and screen a real pipeline
Run interviews and references before an offer goes out

Done properly, that's weeks.

Or you send it to us, and we put a vetted person in the seat within days.

Same seat filled. The only variable is whether you spend August on it.

— Pieter Gunst

CEO & Co-Founder, Legal.io

📊 Data-Driven Legal

$1.1B

Purdue Pharma's lawyers and advisers won final fee approval, pushing the opioid maker's six-year Chapter 11 bill past a billion.

$1.5B

A California judge approved Anthropic's copyright settlement, making it the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.

$2.1B

Funding to legal startups worldwide kept climbing in the first half of the year, as AI keeps legal tech one of the hottest sectors.

📰 Industry Snapshot

New associate hiring is flat, is AI the cause?

SurePoint data shows entry-level AmLaw 200 hiring stuck near 7,400 a year for four straight years despite booming revenues, and laterals now outnumber new associates.

House lawmakers introduce a bipartisan AI 'kill switch'

Reps. Lieu and Moran's AI Kill Switch Act would require top developers to be able to throttle or shut down their models, and let DHS step in during a "loss-of-control" event.

Data centers turn Kirkland's “real assets” practice into a talent magnet

Surging demand for lawyers who handle the land, power, and buildings behind AI data centers has turned Kirkland's 600-lawyer real assets group into one of its fastest-growing practices.

Supervisory skills elevate workers outperforming AI

A KPMG study finds people who excel at directing and checking AI outperform peers with identical knowledge, making judgment and supervision the new differentiator.

Firms gain advantage by treating hiring as a business decision

Firms that approach hiring with real rigor, data, defined ROI, and strategic fit, pull ahead in a tight talent market.

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