The legal sector must start adapting to the needs of its ‘Gen Z’ professionals as they begin to enter the profession, a recent report has said.

The report titled, Is the law still an attractive career for Gen Z, revealed that by 2030, Gen Z professionals will make up more than 30% of the working population. It set out to discover whether this new generation of workers were losing interest in legal careers, and in short, found no evidence to support this.

Legal employers, therefore, will need to be particularly conscious of Gen Z’s “concerns and motivations” if they want to be selective in hiring the best upcoming lawyers.

The report stated that “Gen Z will not be bullied or tolerate harassment to the same degree as previous generations. They want interesting and challenging work but not at the expense of the rest of their lives”

The events of the COVID-19 pandemic have played a massive role in how Gen Z view their working lives and although they may “come into the workforce better qualified on paper than their predecessors, they will all have missed out on important formative social interactions,” that previous generations have built upon from the beginning of their working lives.

Social media and its “toxic effects” on attention span were presented as a challenge for employers to deal with, as this new generation “may well need more support, especially in the early years of their careers, to find their way effectively into a world of work.”

The report emphasised that the legal sector “will quickly need to get better at supervision and mentoring.”

Produced by UK-based legal consultancy firm, Hook Tangaza, the report accounts for 28 jurisdictions, including England and Wales.

It found no evidence to suggest that law as a subject was disinteresting Gen Z students, revealing that in the last decade, “law has consistently attracted between 0.5% and 2.5% of 18-25-year-old population cohorts.”

Describing Gen Z as a “generation of contradictions, craving both security and independence,” the report mentioned that they are mainly interested roles that allow for creativity, flexibility and variety and that legal employers would need to prepare themselves for managing a “less stable” workforce.

Possibly the most important point in the report stated that legal employers who want to stand out to Gen Z candidates will have to “identify and articulate their social values.”

It concluded that the arrival of Gen Z will have a much wider impact on attitudes toward work within and beyond the legal industry, stating that “this cohort will help to bring to the surface many of the underlying evolutionary currents shaping the legal sector”.