21st Century Resourcing Options - Legal Recruiting and Staffing

The legal profession is a business of professionals and clients. Recruiting the best lawyers and professionals is key to the success of firms and corporate legal departments. Jon Lindsey, Janvi Patel and Denise Nurse with decades of experience in recruiting and resourcing describe their practices.

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21st Century Resourcing Options

Janvi Patel?is?co-founder of Halebury and past VP of Elevated Lawyers, focusing on client management and business development as well as team building and management. She started her legal career as an employment solicitor at Charles Russell (now CRS) before moving in-house as a senior employment lawyer at Nortel for EMEA.?

Denise Nurse?is?co-founder of Halebury, and a past VP of Elevated Lawyers, focusing on strategy, management, and client service.?She co-founded Halebury as an opportunity to create the kind of firm that she would like to work for. Having started her career as an in-house commercial solicitor at Charles Russell (now CRS), she worked in-house as a commercial and technology lawyer for Sky before helping to develop and shape the Halebury offering.?

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For centuries, the provision of legal advice has been provided through one dominant option: practitioners of law. Like doctors, lawyers as a profession have focused on individual specialties?and been licensed to practice or advise the public on legal issues. In order to create efficiencies, groups of individual practitioners formed partnerships to bring resources together, provide a wider selection of practice areas, and pool risk – businesses run?by?lawyers?for?lawyers. For recipients of this service, this has been the only option.

The dominant business model has been (and still is) “an organization or economic system where goods and services are exchanged for one another.” The early part of the 21st?century, however, has seen some of the most radical changes in business model options for the provision of legal services. Resourcing options play a major part in this significant evolution.

The last part of the 20th?century saw the steady growth of in-house law departments within businesses. The start of the 21st?century has seen the rise of flexible legal resourcing provided as a subset of services by law companies. These were named “Alternative Legal Service Providers,” or ALSPs, to denote the fact that they are not structured as law firm partnerships or even businesses owned and managed by lawyers. Businesses in this area offering a broader range of services now call themselves “law companies”; at times, the names are interchangeable.

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Legal Recruiting and Staffing

Jon Lindsey?is the New York founding partner of?Major, Lindsey & Africa. Over the past two decades, Jon has placed scores of partners and practice groups at many of the world’s top law firms and assisted firms in merger and branch office acquisitions. As the former global co-chair of the MLA’s Partner Practice Group, Jon helped to set strategy and coordinate the partner practice for the firm’s 25 domestic and international offices. He is the co-author of “Managing People in Today’s Law Firm” (Quorum Books, 1995) and the 2014 MLA “Lateral Partner Satisfaction Survey.”?

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During the three and a half decades since the 1982 founding of our firm — Major, Lindsey & Africa (MLA) — the legal recruiting and staffing industry has undergone enormous changes; indeed, in many respects, it has changed more than the legal industry it serves.

The Role of Legal Recruiting and Staffing Firms

Legal recruiting and staffing firms make professional placements for a variety of positions and professional roles at client companies and law firms, either for permanent placement or for more limited durations of time. They include:

• In-House Legal Departments: in-house counsel positions, e.g., general counsel (GC), corporate counsel, or legal secretary.
• Law Firms: partner and associate candidates who typically work exclusively with a single recruiter to identify firms that would be the best cultural, financial, and practice fit.
• Business Management: retained searches for firms’ business management professionals, e.g., chief operating officer (COO), chief marketing officer (CMO), chief strategy officer (CSO), chief financial officer (CFO), and corporate legal department operations professionals.
• Permanent: full-time employees, whether at law firms or in-house at companies.
• Specialized/Temporary: legal professionals for specific projects or on an interim and temporary-to-permanent hire basis (both at companies and law firms).

? Most of the scores of legal recruiting firms in the U.S. have a small handful of recruiters in a single city; several have offices in more than one city. Our firm is unique in having more than 200 recruiting professionals in more than 25 locations worldwide, including London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Amsterdam, Sydney, Delhi, and cities across the U.S. This provides the distinct advantage of having market information about law firms, corporate clients, and practice trends globally rather than just for a single city.

Why Use a Recruiter?

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