New Year, New Recruits

The question every law firm asks itself at the start of every year is: “who are we going to recruit next?”, because smart lateral partner hiring is the acme of law firm strategy. Fully 96% of AmLaw200 firms believe it’s the most effective growth strategy for them.

And yet the sad truth is that it often fails. My own research in the UK back in the 2010s showed that 32% of partner lateral hires fail after two years, and US due diligence specialists Decipher Investigative Intelligence reckon that 75% of partner hires fail overall, with 48% of laterals quitting within five years and 50% failing to break even in that time.

Partner lateral hiring is often more opportunistic than strategic, partly because you don’t know who you’re going to be able to prise away from another firm, and partly because of an insistence that smart lawyers can do anything in their area.

Most often you acquire a haphazard bunch of clients (if you’re lucky...) and a variable clutch of skills that end up skewing your practice out of shape if you’re not careful. It’s less strategy and more mud-at-the-wall, scale over scheme.  

The more sophisticated firms have refined their search and integration processes so they get more hits than misses, but in my experience all too many firms, including many of the largest, fail at the basics.

Here’s my Bingo card of law firm lateral hire fails:  

-       Lack of strategy – what, beyond making more money, are you trying to do with this hire? Are you recruiting for your sector play or for departmental resource?

-       Poor job brief –  ‘White Knight’ syndrome – teamplayer, self-starter, good client following etc etc. Recruiters get the same brief from literally everyone, there’s rarely a detailed description of the need.

-       Failure to tell the candidate ‘why them’ – beyond ‘we want your money’.

-       Poor interview process – lack of system, poor reporting, lack of effective comparison, too much ‘gut feel’.

-       Failure to anticipate internal problems – it’s *always* about territory.

-       Poor post-hire integration – desk, chair, computer, what else do you want?

All of these can be tackled *before* you pay a recruiter to go find someone, saving you time, pain and money and making the recruiter’s job easier when you do finally decide to recruit. Drop me a private message if you’d like to discuss.