Hire Kinney--Or Work at Kinney?

kinney famGetting to know those of us on Kinney Recruiting’s Asia team in 2016 presents a unique opportunity for two major constituencies: first, associates and future associates with an interest in (and realistic chances of) working in top US practices in Asia, especially those who aspire to become partner in a law firm; second, successful recruiters who were successful attorneys first, have great personalities such that they are fun people to be around, and who would like to expand their practices by associating with the most successful recruiters in Asia.

First, let’s clear the air: despite what you’re seeing in the news, there’s still significant business activity in Asia leading to equally significant need to hire attorneys this year.  We anticipate a great year for our Asia business on the back of a near-record 2015.

I am obviously biased, but I can see absolutely no reason why any associate-level US attorney working in Asia or wanting to move there should consider working with any other recruiting firm.  Most don’t use any other recruiter if they get to know us.  A conversation with the head of our Asia team is like a cache dump from the Encyclopedia, “Working as a Lawyer in Asia.”  If you have talked to him you know what I mean.  Yuliya Vinokurova is also awesome too when it comes to Asia.   I’m not half bad myself.

The statistics speak for themselves: we have literally placed or advised every single associate who has made partner at an Amlaw 50 firm in Asia in the last five years.  This should be no surprise since, over the last ten years, we at Kinney Recruiting have placed about 200 attorneys in Asia at various US and UK law firms.  When you place that many people you talk to a multiple of that number.   Of these people we have placed and advised, some have made partner at the firm where we placed them or another firm, while some have moved on to in-house roles we or others filled.  But many remain in their original jobs.

Why does this matter?  Well, most importantly, we have a very robust and well-curated database of and a long institutional memory.  Working with us presents the chance to leverage the data we have gathered over years; not just on offers, but on the personalities of those giving them, the trajectory of various career paths around the Asia-Pacific region, and the forecasts about the future that those behind the offers are making.

Our biggest problems are two: we are not very pushy and we generally do not do a lot of cold calling because we work with so many firms.  There are a couple of exceptions where we work through third-parties due to friction with certain difficult personalities in our client firms (yes, we’ll also tell you who the jerks are after we get to know you – they can still be good bosses sometimes), but we work directly with almost every law firm.  As such, we are often prohibited by our agreements and good ethics when we have made recent placements from calling into those firms.  Were it not for our need to wait to be contacted by many of our more junior candidates after they hear about us, we surely would be working on every deal that is done at the top law firms in Asia for associates.

After ten years of doing this work in Asia, our team has also become quite a bit older than our typical junior associate candidate.  We are young at heart and at least one of us is generally in good shape at any given time, but we just don’t always know the most junior candidates like we would if we were still running in the same circles as they.  We have a lot of friends who are partners at firms, some of whom we helped place once as an associate and then later somewhere else as a partner.  Thus, we often know and are even close friends with the person doing the hiring.  This is obviously invaluable for our candidates.

What we lack, and sorely need to have in place in Hong Kong, is someone who is what we no longer are: a junior or mid-level attorney at a strong firm, with exceptional people-skill, strong self-confidence, and a lot of patience, who wants to try something different from the legal work he or she has been doing.  If that’s you, or might be you, I hope you’ll get in touch with us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.  If you refer us to someone we hire, we’ll also do something nice for you, so give this a little thought if you’ve read this far and drop us a line!