Recruiting

Job of the Week: Seasoned Professionals Wanted for Partner Recruiting Practice

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Lateral Link had a record year in 2012. We promoted eleven recruiters — five new Principals, five new Senior Directors, and one new Managing Director. Given our existing client base, we are hiring Directors for our Partner Group in all major markets to assist with partner level recruiting for Am Law 200 and regional boutiques.

Lateral Link is a leading global legal recruiting firm with twelve (12) offices in the United States and Asia. We have immediate openings in our New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Dallas offices for a Director-level recruiters to focus on partner search. This is a unique opportunity to leverage an existing client base while joining our team of experienced recruiters, including Larry Latourette (HLS ’82), former managing partner of the Preston Gates, DC office and partner recruiter with over a decade of experience, who manages our partner recruiting practice.

Why Lateral Link? Continue reading to learn more….

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The Best and the Brightest: Some Reflections on Entry-Level Law Firm Hiring

By Bruce MacEwen

Ed. note: This is the first in a new series, “Across the Desk,” from Bruce MacEwen and Janet Stanton of Adam Smith Esq. and JDMatch. “Across the Desk” will take a thoughtful look at recruiting, career paths, professional development, human capital and related issues. Some of these pieces will have previously appeared, in slightly different form, on AdamSmithEsq.com.

As noted in the American Lawyer recently, the lateral recruiting boom of recent years continues unabated. As the Am Law article points out, “At the same time [as they’re focused on hiring lateral partners], firms appear to be homing in on their poor performers. Nine out of 10 survey respondents said their firm has ‘unprofitable’ partners, and seven out of 10 said their firms have partners at risk of being deequitized or ‘put on performance plans.’ As one survey respondent put it: ‘There are too many partners without sufficient billable work.’”

Now, wouldn’t you think it would make sense — if firms are worried about underperformers — to pay some attention to associates as well as partners? After all, some of those associates should, speaking theoretically at least, be your future partners.

Yet there’s unrebutted evidence that firms look at the wrong criteria when hiring associates….

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The Brave New World of Entry-Level Recruiting

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Greetings from San Francisco, home of the world champion Giants, surprisingly noisy trolley cars, and the faint smell of cannabis pretty much everywhere. We’re in town to attend Ark Group‘s conference on “The Brave New World of Entry-Level Recruiting,” which examines how the world of law student recruiting by firms has changed (and will continue to evolve) since the onset of the Great Recession. Moderated by Bruce MacEwen, who kicked off the proceedings by framing the day as an opportunity for “frank conversation” between schools and firms, the conference featured an absolute Murderers’ Row of industry thought leaders, including Orrick‘s Ralph Baxter, legal academia’s apostate Paul Campos, NALP’s Jim Leipold, Indiana/Maurer‘s Bill Henderson, three Biglaw hiring partners, and deans from Berkeley, Stanford, and Hastings.

Read on for some highlights and takeaways from yesterday’s conference.

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House Rules: Happy Halloween

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It drives me crazy that my kids had “Harvest” parties at school today. Harvest what? It’s Halloween for Chrissakes. Every calendar in the office here says it’s Halloween. It is not Harvest Day, and believe me, with the reduction of old-time husbandry and the growth of corporate farming, it is difficult to envision ConAgra holding a Harvest Festival. Anyway.

I am not in a good mood of late. The hurricane has really put a damper (seriously, no pun intended) on the spirits of a lot of folks in the Northeast. Spare me the “it’s about time New York got its comeuppance” crap; this is serious stuff. Politically savvy or not, when Chris Christie starts praising Obama and FEMA with apparent sincerity, you know that stuff just got real. For us in Western New York we had a crapload of leaves to shovel; first world problem, I know. You almost feel an embarrassment of riches when you have a sore back from yard clean-up and many people have no home to clean. But, Springsteen postponed his show here from last night until tonight which is a blessing, so there’s that. And my kids are going to be done trick or treating and in bed before the first notes of “Badlands” ring out.

But I digress. This is a Halloween post, and I should have some scary stuff to discuss….

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ATL Career Center Launches Resource for Revived Lateral Market

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‘We’re going to a new firm!’

Even in a world where “Who’ll be the next Dewey?” is a Biglaw parlor game and the general legal job market hits the bottom and keeps digging, there still are a few bright spots for the industry. Some examples: law firm associate classes, though contracted, appear to have stabilized, revenues for the largest law firms grew by the highest rate since 2007, and lateral hiring is back in a big way.

According to NALP, the volume of 2011 lateral hiring was up by nearly 50 percent compared with 2010, with associates accounting for almost three-quarters of the lateral traffic. Obviously, the data is not in for this year, but according to one veteran headhunter we spoke with, the revived lateral attorney market has continued through 2012. Admittedly, this trend is not a bright spot if one believes that a fast-flowing lateral market is a key ingredient in the recipe for more Deweys. But at the very least, we are in a better environment for those looking to make a lateral move.

Unlike much of the labor marketplace, legal recruitment generally has not migrated online. In the large firm context, would-be lateral attorneys continue to require the specialized knowledge and carefully cultivated relationships of the legal recruiter. Today, the ATL Career Center launches its Practicing Lawyers section, which features a Recruiter Directory, a new resource for those of you looking for greener pastures. After the jump, check out the founding members of the Directory….

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A Guide for Surviving On-Campus Interviewing With Style

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Would that it were easy for women to dress professionally without being critiqued on every aspect of their ensemble. If that were the case, then we wouldn’t have so much to write about when it comes to the intersection of fashion and women’s issues. From hairstyle to hemline to heel height, women are constantly bombarded with differing opinions as to what’s acceptable to wear in the workplace.

With on-campus interviewing season right around the corner, you’ll need to look and act the part. The hour has drawn nigh for some tips that will allow our female readers to maintain a stylish appearance from a day in the office to a night out, all at the click of a button. Because fashion should be a piece of cake, even for lawyerly ladies who are too busy to shop….

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Best Law Schools For Biglaw

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If you want to get into Biglaw, it's all about the Ivy.

It’s a list that should mean more than it does: which law schools are best at sending their graduates to large law firms, aka Biglaw?

There are a lot of reasons this question isn’t asked more often: law schools don’t like their supposed professional value to be reduced to placements at top firms, prospective law students don’t like to think that in three years they’ll have a “Biglaw or bust” mentality, and Biglaw placement lists undervalue clerkship appointments (which often turn into Biglaw gigs a year or two later). Intellectually, it feels small-minded to put a heavy focus on whether or not a school sends a high proportion of its graduates straight into Biglaw after graduation.

Except that in a world with ever-rising tuition costs, the ability to place students in Biglaw is more important than ever. Biglaw jobs are pretty much the only ones out there that pay enough money for graduates to be able to manage their ridiculous debt loads. And there are fewer Biglaw jobs than before. Top law schools should be able to place well in Biglaw, or they should be offering tuition rebates to students.

If the kids who are thinking about going to law school refuse to pay attention to life’s realities, maybe the parents who are pushing their children into the legal profession will take note. Here are the top schools for placing in Biglaw. If your kid isn’t getting into one of these schools, maybe you should reconsider co-signing their loans…

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Are You Ready For The Summer? Do You Know How To Pronounce The Names Of All The Firms?

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I used to work at Debevoise & Plimpton. Before I interviewed with them, I learned that the firm was called Debevoise (rhymes with “noise”) and not Debevoise (rhymes with voire “boudoir”).

Not everybody who showed for interviews had that level of commitment. How embarrassing for them. At Debevoise, they’re a little touchy about the proper pronunciation of the firm’s name — and not just with potential recruits. Do you know how stupid you sound when you are sitting with a bunch of Biglaw New York lawyers and your roll out with “Debevoir” or “Curtis Mallet” (as in hammer)? You sound like an idiot. People will make fun of you when you go to the bathroom. I once heard a person pronounce Cravath like “cravat,” and it was so jarring that I swear that’s the only thing I remember about the person. If I saw him again, our mutual friend would have to pull me aside and say, “That’s the ‘cravat’ guy.”

There are services out there to help you avoid these embarrassing mistakes. You should put in a little bit of time before you head to New York, or D.C., or L.A., or anywhere where top lawyers are likely to be….

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The Commendable Yet Futile Harvard Law Campaign To ‘Just Say No’ to Biglaw

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Anybody can say no to crack, but I know Superheroes who wouldn't turn down $160K.

It’s a story so common that it’s almost a cliché to bring it up. Idealistic young people show up at law school full of commitment to the public interest or something similar, time passes, and three years later they’re all heading off to S&C, to Proskauer, to the best Biglaw job they can find. Or they clerk for a year and then go to one of these firms. If they don’t get teaching jobs, you’ll see them sharing offices in the highest-paying law firm they can find.

It happens all the time. And, for the most part, it always happens for the same reason: money. Oh, individuals will tell themselves they gave up on their low-paying dreams for all sorts of reasons. But they’re just trying to make themselves feel better. It’s always about the money. ALWAYS.

Trust me, if it wasn’t always about the money, I would not be able to guarantee a traffic spike whenever I put “bonus” in a headline. Or whenever I write about law firms paying first-year associates more than $160K.

Right now, at Harvard Law School, there is a group of students trying to push back on this transformation of idealistic Harvard Law students into materialistic lawyer drones. It’s a really nice, heartfelt effort, one that we don’t see nearly enough of on campus.

I’m going to be sad when reality wears them out like a Colombian prostitute on some Secret Service agents….

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Quinn Emanuel Takes a New Approach to On-Campus Recruiting

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Obtaining a summer associate position at a major law firm remains difficult. That’s the upshot of a recent report (PDF) issued by our friends at NALP. You can read summaries of the report at the NALP website and at the ABA Journal. This quip, by NALP executive director Jim Leipold, pretty much says it all: “This is not a hot recruiting market.”

Given that employers are still in the driver’s seat, at least when it comes to entry-level recruiting — recruiting of lateral lawyers, whether associates or partners, is a different kettle of fish — you’d think that law firms would use this opportunity to experiment a bit with fall recruiting. There are some interesting alternatives out there to the standard model of 20- to 30-minute screening interviews, typically held in the summer before or early fall of the 2L year, followed by callback interviews at the firms. E.g., JD Match (disclosure: a past ATL advertiser).

But law firms, as we know, are a conservative group. They tend to stick with existing models, even if those models are imperfect.

Well, most law firms. Nobody ever accused Quinn Emanuel of not daring to be different….

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