Legal & Data Protection Market September 2022
The legal recruitment market in Malta is continuing on its trends from 2021 and early 2022 by continuing to recruit both within law firms and in-house legal counsel positions. Throughout 2022 so far, we have not seen significant increases in salaries across most seniority levels except for below 2 years of PQE.
Law graduates and junior lawyers with less than 2 years PQE have been the most in-demand professionals in the legal market, which has created some competition to attract the best talent. We are not seeing drastic salary increases, but on an overall level, the average salaries of graduates with up to 2 years PQE have increased.
We are still experiencing high levels of activity in regulated industries such as iGaming and Fintech being the industries which are coming across as the highest paid industries. Due to the Moneyval and FATF evaluations last year, companies started hiring more legal & compliance professionals in order to counter the grey listing. What we have seen here because of Malta’s proactive approach and increased hiring in regulated industries, is that Malta is being taken off the grey list.
Another trend that we have seen this year is that companies are more than ever hiring junior lawyers to start their careers in-house, which has also created more competition with traditional law firms. Due to more and more lawyers starting their careers in-house than ever before, there has also been a hiring need for more senior lawyers within firms, rather than only offering internal growth for graduates.
The market over the last 6 months has offered good employment opportunities due to some of the previously mentioned trends and one measure many companies have taken to stay competitive and attract the best talent, is to be more open-minded to bringing in talent from abroad, rather than only hiring locally.
This has also opened more opportunities for legal professionals abroad that are interested in relocating to Malta, which is still attractive for foreign talent looking to have a lifestyle change or to further develop their careers.
In the field of Data Protection, there is talent available but with only periodic opportunities. We are seeing companies often outsourcing these functions and appointing an internal Data Protection Officer (DPO), rather than having large internal teams.
This has made the data protection field a very competitive market for candidates and we are seeing strong technical skills in privacy as well as CIPP qualifications being valuable for employers hiring data protection professionals.