Lateral Partner Recruiting: The Beauty Of Boutiques

What advantages do boutique law firms enjoy over larger firms when trying to lure lateral partner candidates?

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on lateral partner moves from Lateral Link’s team of expert contributors. Jonathan Birenbaum is a Director in our New York office and focuses his practices on lateral partner, group and associate placements and client services in the New York area and Canada. Prior to joining Lateral Link, Jon, was a legal recruiter with a New York City boutique legal recruiting company where he placed associates and partners in a variety of practice areas with AmLaw, regional and boutique law firms in New York, California, New Mexico and in Toronto. Prior to his career in legal recruiting, Jon was a litigator with the City of New York, the New York State Attorney General’s Office and in private practice as a healthcare litigator with two New York City firms. Jon holds a J.D. from St. John’s University School of Law in New York and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I started out as a legal recruiter in 2007. After success with a series of lateral associate placements, the recession hit and associate hiring slowed significantly. The owner of my recruiting firm encouraged us to start cultivating a partner portfolio to broaden the scope of our work. Since then, I have facilitated numerous lateral partner placements with regional, Am Law 200, and boutique law firms. I have come to understand that the recruiting process can differ greatly with the size of the law firm. Partner candidates and their recruiters must take these differences as well as the candidate’s scheduling and timing needs into account when devising the best search strategy for that individual.

The first partner I recruited was an undercompensated yet well-respected defense litigator. I introduced him to an Am Law 200 firm as well as to a regional firm based in Pennsylvania. My candidate appealed to both firms because of his national reputation, the key client he represented (a major North American transportation client), and his history of strong billables and collections. Both firms immediately expressed an interest in meeting with him….

A regional or Am Law 200 firm will typically fly strong partner candidates to their hub to meet with the head of the firm as well as with other members of their executive committee (who will ultimately vote on admitting the attorney to the partnership). Smaller firms operating primarily in a single city can move much more swiftly by eliminating trips to an out-of-state mother ship and by assembling partnership votes at the drop of dime. They gain an advantage over Am Law firms in their ability to produce and execute an offer much faster than Am Law firms.

My candidate, after being courted by both firms, was offered a non-equity partnership with the smaller regional firm. While this offer with the smaller firm was, in my candidate’s words, “the offer,” he was hesitant to accept it because the Am Law 200 firm had an office in a strategic location in New York State that my candidate saw as potentially pivotal to his successful representation of his key client.

Midsized firms generally have a fairly streamlined hiring process. An individualized approach can allow the firm to work out potential conflicts with the partner, the client and the firm early on in the process. At Am Law 200 firms, the bureaucratic machine often makes it much more difficult to navigate these hurdles efficiently, compounded by the greater likelihood of conflicts with larger firms.

Prior to the regional firm’s offer, the partner candidate, the CEO of the candidate’s key client and the managing partner of the hiring firm met at the firm’s northeast headquarters to discuss and resolve potential conflicts and so the key client could “sign off” on the partner’s move. The hiring partner of the Am Law firm was not in a position to match or exceed the amount of guaranteed compensation that the smaller firm offered my candidate. The efficiency of the smaller firm, in addition to the higher compensation it was offering, was enough to tip the scales in favor of that smaller firm.

The boutique firms I work with in Manhattan will schedule initial meetings for partner candidates with their hiring partners and sometimes one or two other key partners. They almost always request that a candidate complete a Lateral Partner Questionnaire (LPQ), they run a conflicts check, and they vet the candidate through professional references and by surveying colleagues along with adversaries shared by the candidate and the partners of the hiring firm.

These smaller, sleeker firms can be a pleasure for partner candidates to deal with because they have the opportunity to meet a large percentage of the partners and members of the target group, often within about six weeks of starting the process. Compare this to meeting with the heads of practice groups at a 30-office firm, a process that can take six months to a year. Boutiques can also provide an up-and-coming partner with a fast track to a leadership title. The attorney can quickly become known as a decision maker within the firm. Boutiques also offer senior lawyers a more intimate working relationship with colleagues and associates, which can be intrinsically rewarding and even lead to more profitability.

It is important to understand the timing needs of lateral partner candidates, as well as the realities of their schedules. As a former litigator, I understand that litigation partners’ time, for example, is stretched incredibly thin by court appearances, conference calls with judges and adversaries, depositions and motion practice deadlines. If timing is an important factor, a partner candidate may wish to favor smaller firms, and of course should seek the advice of an experienced recruiter who is familiar with the lateral hiring processes at the specific firms.


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