Is sabotage affecting your partner hires?

Is your partner hiring process being sabotaged?

Law firms do a lot of lateral hiring – recruiter Edwards Gibson recorded 510 partner moves in London alone in 2023, a record high – and most firms have had successes and failures in this tricky task.

But what about the great hires you never made?

You know the ones: the perfect fit who ‘fails’ at business plan stage despite having billed consistently well throughout their career; the star candidate who just “wasn’t quite right”, after *five* interviews; the “awkward” woman (it’s always a woman); the “too camp” one; the “shifty” one who coincidentally wasn’t as white as the rest of the team; or the woman that would be “distracting for associates”.

Sometimes it’s even more subtle. The last-minute mysterious conflict which turned out to be one partner's hunch. The presupposition that a shared client wouldn’t want to concentrate their advisers in one place, when it later turned out that nobody ever asked the client.

Those aren’t just random, they’re all real examples from my time as a recruiter.

But outside of personal animus and plain old bias, the financial realities which govern every firm are primarily responsible for the lateral train unexpectedly leaving the tracks.

Whether codified in some kind of hard client ‘ownership’ system or expressed more subtly in client partner and matter management, territory is what we’re talking about, and, linked to that, competence.

It’s tough to hire someone who is better than you are, but the more ruthless your firm’s system for sharing the profits, the less likely it is that recruiting partners will hire someone who might show them up or, worse, ‘steal’ their clients. Heaven forfend the firm should be offering clients a top drawer service, as opposed to one modulated by partner insecurity...

Here are a few amber flags:

-       The department head who cares more about ‘team stability’ than meeting their budget.
-       Departments where every partner has individual veto power.
-       When one of the interviewing partners is called onto a case which consumes every waking moment and more, and the hire fails.
-       When one of the interviewing partners goes on holiday/away on business and claims to be ‘uncontactable’, and the hire fails.
-       The process which takes so long that the candidate or, worse, team loses interest (team hires are especially prone to process lag).

Smart firms, imho, don’t leave recruitment solely in the charge of whichever department is doing the hiring. Smart firms have a tight process, with a plan in place, systematised interviewing and information sharing. Smart firms mandate the early involvement of a head of HR/head of recruitment with deep experience of the partner process and management clout.

I'm not saying override concerns on 'fit'. I'm just saying keep a watchful eye, and make sure everyone is thinking: 'firm first'.