CLOC’s 2025 State of the Industry report, drawn from the 2024 Harbor Law Department Survey, collected responses from 186 organizations across more than 15 industries and 14 countries. It found that 83 percent of departments expect demand for legal services to continue growing, and that 63 percent name workload and resource bandwidth as the top challenge. The same report put median legal-department headcount at 77 full-time employees, from 13 at companies below $3 billion of revenue to 244 above $40 billion. The median legal-operations function was 5 full-time employees, unchanged since 2023. Thirty percent had an AI tool in use, up from 18 percent in 2023. Those are global survey cuts. They are not a count of London vacancies.
On 2 March 2026 CLOC released the 2026 State of the Industry report, based on the 2025 Harbor survey of 135 law departments with median revenue of $13 billion. Regulatory compliance was cited as a workload driver by 63 percent of departments, and cybersecurity by 58 percent. Only 32 percent expect attorney headcount to increase. Only 37 percent expect outside-counsel spend to increase, down from 58 percent the year before. Expectations for an increase in inside legal spend fell from 65 percent to 47 percent. Eighty-five percent now have dedicated AI oversight or resources. The focus areas CLOC named were technology strategy (80 percent), financial management (72 percent), and outside-counsel and vendor management (62 percent). A London general counsel who cannot add lawyers, and who has been told not to send the overflow to a firm, is describing a legal-operations brief.
The London-specific load is statutory, and it landed in 2025. The failure-to-prevent-fraud offence in the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 came into force on 1 September 2025. Home Office guidance, updated 10 October 2025, says the offence applies to a large organization that meets at least two of three tests in section 201: more than 250 employees, more than £36 million turnover, and more than £18 million in total assets. The defence is reasonable prevention procedures. Writing those procedures, training the people who can commit the base fraud, and keeping a record the GC can show, is operations work. It is not a reason to hire a fourth contentious lawyer and call the inbox a control.
TheCityUK, on 9 December 2025, put UK legal-services gross value added at £38 billion for 2024, 1.5 percent of the economy, with a trade surplus of £8.9 billion. The same day’s report put 2023 legal-services employment in London at 133,000 people on the headline line, against a UK total of about 364,000. The report’s regional table lists London at 128,000. A brief should say which line it is using. Neither figure is a count of legal-operations jobs. Both say the city still concentrates the departments that have to run the procedures above.
Sartori has worked the London in-house market for more than 10 years. Over three years the desk closed 24 in-house searches, at 93 percent completion, on a typical timeline of 4 to 7 months. A counter-offer arrived on 32 percent of them. The median from written offer to acceptance was 13 working days. The interview cohort for the city is 750 structured interviews. That cohort is one number, used on every London page that quotes interviews.
