The debate over the value of partner recruitment has intensified in recent years. Legal Business analyses hiring trends at top 50 firms and assesses the link between lateral hiring and financial performance
The mixed fortunes of law firms in recruiting partners can be summed up using a simple compare and contrast exercise. Compare the fanfare surrounding Kirkland & Ellis’ May hire of leveraged finance heavyweight Stephen Lucas from Weil, Gotshal & Manges and contrast it with, at the other end of the spectrum, this observation on one top 100 UK firm: ‘A firm can either pay more, or accept someone who is slightly mental but has a book of business.This firm had a policy saying it was OK to take on nutters and put them under a tight belt of management. The assumption was these people might be dreadful – they might pinch the secretary’s bottom/shout at people/throw telephones at people – but they will bill and the management process will deal with the issues that arise. And it worked – back then.’
Research by Mark Brandon, a former recruitment specialist and founder of consultancy Motive Legal, has shown that an alarming number of partners laterally recruited in the last five years are no longer with the firm they joined.
‘Some lateral hires can be described as “drizzlemakers” – ie short of work,’ says Brandon. ‘It sums up the feeling around lateral hires that have “kind of” worked. People are bad at looking at the holistic effect of lateral hiring – what effect a lateral hiring policy can have on a firm as a whole.’
In some regards, partner recruitment has arguably become more problematic over the last decade. Recent research by Indiana University Maurer School of Law professor William Henderson and Pennsylvania State University professor Christopher Zorn concluded that when partners first began moving in the late 1980s, a path was provided for ambitious individuals to find better platforms or just escape firms going nowhere. Those hires generally did well because there was a clear economic rationale for the move on both sides. But the last 15 years have seen the emergence of a genuine lateral market for partners who are just moving sideways.
Though the research was US-focused, most City observers would say the trend of partners moving between similar firms with little economic impact has been repeated in the UK.
In a recent article in Legal Business, Bruce MacEwen, president of legal consultancy Adam Smith, Esq, argued that the widespread fixation by firms on pursuing laterals, ‘a kind of professional arms race of escalation without logic’ – was the consequence of a toxic preoccupation by the profession on the short term. ‘Rather than developing and investing in strategies for genuine sustainable growth, virtually all firms opt for the quick fix of an immediate top-line boost through laterals (that may or may not contribute to the bottom line),’ he argued. ‘Moreover, our batting average with laterals is mixed or poor, depending on how elastic one’s definition of success is. We’re not even buying revenue – we’re just renting it.’
And, of course, the debate over the role and reliance of lateral recruitment has only intensified given the part that aggressive recruitment and income guarantees played in the 2012 collapse of Dewey & LeBoeuf, to say nothing of Berwin Leighton Paisner’s problems last year with guaranteed packages for high-profile recruits.
Still, for all the focus on the problems with strategic recruitment, it continues partly because while many hires deliver either only modest or poor returns, in a notable number of cases partner recruitment has proved a strikingly effective tool for upwardly mobile law firms. The question on many minds in the City – a query for which there are currently only patchy answers – is what is the secret formula for identifying, persuading and then integrating profit-driving partners? And, as important, how can law firms hone their sense of when to walk away from a potential hire?
Whatever the limitations of partner recruitments, our data shows that although actual lateral recruitment numbers may be slightly down for 2013/14, over the past few years it has steadily grown. A limited strategy or not, its overall popularity shows no sign of fading.
Case study: Lateral hiring at RPC
Despite only bringing in four partners in the last financial year – including marine specialist Iain Anderson in Singapore, who arrived from Ince & Co, and finance partner Sukh Ahark from Davenport Lyons in London – RPC has proportionally hired more lateral partners on average than any other firm in the top 50 since 2008. A number of recruitment specialists note the firm has a smooth process that allows for an easy transition of incoming partners to the firm.
One notable aspect of RPC’s lateral hiring process is that managing partner Jonathan Watmough is involved from the beginning. ‘The lateral process has to be led from and owned by the managing partner and the business, not HR,’ says Watmough.
Once a partner has joined, Watmough says the firm takes a long-term view on success. ‘We are realistic about the fact that when people move firms it can take more than a year to bed down business, so we don’t expect new partners to bill at the top levels straight away. We keep our eyes firmly on the long road,’ he says.
Despite recruitment specialists singing the praises of RPC as a good firm to work with, Watmough reveals that some of the laterals the firm brings in are done via ‘friends and family’ in which case there is no recruiter involvement. However, he concedes that recruitment firms are crucial for introductions as they act as intermediaries and ‘have the ear of the candidate’. But once the candidate is introduced, all the work is done by the firm.
Watmough comments: ‘The best [recruiters] really know and understand us and why we’re different and so can both sell us properly and only represent us to the right candidates.’ He is dismissive of those who ring around the market, looking for business. ‘It’s irresponsible and ultimately destructive for everyone, except them,’ he says.
Due diligence is an integral part of the lateral hire process, although RPC does not use a third party to conduct its vetting for its lateral recruitment. One main reason for this policy is a concern over confidentiality risks that may arise using a third party.
Watmough explains what he looks for in a lateral: ‘The crux for us is character fit with the partnership, smart, team players who are nice, and quality. Only once we’re satisfied on both of these levels do we consider the business fit, and we will never hire unless the character and quality fit is right no matter how attractive the business fit.’
Big data
The most obvious point to note from our table of selected firms that occupy the top 50 of the latest Legal Business 100 (LB100) is that lateral recruitment among those firms was down in the 2013/14 financial year. But there are a number of factors that could have contributed to this decline, beyond the obvious suggestion that appetite for hiring partners has waned.
The data is inevitably skewed by large-scale acquisitions of firms or mergers, which have dominated the top 25 firms in recent years: new partners joining the firm from an acquired firm will often be deemed as a lateral. The typical top 50 firm averages 13 lateral hires a year (11 if you discount DLA Piper), equal to roughly 4% of the average partnership size.
Predictably corporate dominates the practice areas affected by partner movement, accounting for nearly a third of all hires, including private equity, equity capital markets and restructuring.
The revival in transactional mandates in western Europe in particular over the last six months has led to increased demand for laterals, particularly since the start of the year. Latham & Watkins’ well-documented push into private equity (see boxout) in the City is a clear sign of that. Scott Gibson, co-founder of recruitment firm Edwards Gibson, comments: ‘There is a lot more headhunting. Aside from the usual corporate, capital markets, banking and disputes, real estate and real estate-led construction is currently in fashion – we will see more moves there.’
An increased demand for real estate partners is a sure sign of returning confidence in the legal market, as it was an area that fared particularly badly during the downturn. In addition, the appetite for hiring in areas that have flourished during the last four or five years – disputes, regulatory and investigations – has remained strong.
‘Corporate is storming it; investigations is huge,’ says headhunter Colin Jones from Eximius Law. ‘Real estate investment is making a return – mainly bankside. Project finance and energy are still big – not so much in renewables, more oil and gas.’
‘Corporate, IP and banking have all been busy for the last 12-15 months but real estate has really picked up recently,’ says Conor Dilworth, director at Pro-Legal. ‘Real estate partners retain quite a bit of client loyalty and probably feel in a stronger position than they have done for years.’
Case study: Lateral hiring at Allen & Overy
When it comes to hiring, Allen & Overy (A&O) is by far the most active Magic Circle firm. It has hired 118 lateral partners since 2008, at an average of 20 hires per year, while Clifford Chance, Linklaters and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer have hired ten, seven and five laterals a year on average since 2008 respectively.
Recent hires include corporate partner Hans Diekmann from Shearman & Sterling in Dusseldorf; and, most significantly, corporate heavyweight Stephen Lloyd from Ashurst in London as well as private equity partner Karan Dinamani.
The firm employs a rigid hiring approach driven by the sponsoring partner who normally submits the business case to the lateral committee. Once approved, the firm goes to the market to find candidates, who then undergo a lengthy selection process. A&O global managing partner Wim Dejonghe says: ‘Given the rigour we put into our process, it can seem burdensome to candidates. I prefer it this way. I prefer to have the rigour in the process and lose them here than later.’
Upon selection, the firm sets up an integration programme for around three months where the incoming partner meets between 20 and 30 partners across the firm. After this, the partner is monitored like any other existing partner. ‘If you don’t invest the time here, there is a risk the partner may not succeed,’ says Dejonghe. And while a successful lateral hire does give credibility to its sponsoring partner, there is always the risk of an unsuccessful appointment. ‘It can affect the internal perception of the sponsoring partner if the lateral hire is unsuccessful. But if they have a personal interest in their success it makes for better hires, so we would never want to discourage partners from putting a business case forward,’ he adds.
Despite making significant investment in boosting certain practice areas, the firm insists it seeks quality over the candidates’ book of business. ‘Firms hire to add top-line revenue; we don’t do that. We already have clients. Obviously they need to perform, but that’s the starting point. It is more about integration and personal fit rather than the partner bringing £5m,’ says Dejonghe.
More money, more problems
The most frequent criticism levelled at the lateral recruitment strategies of law firms is there is no strategy – the focus is always on the short term. Gibson argues that partners are simply leased these days, rather than becoming truly part of a partnership – you buy them for a few years to do what they do.
‘The firms best at hiring, hire to fulfil a specific need,’ he says. ‘For example, a firm could have a good brand name but have an insufficient bench. The most successful hires are often not in transactional areas – partners tend to stay longer in pensions/employment/tax. Hiring in support functions is more successful as expectation is lower and because the firm is not hiring them for the business they bring.’
‘Because we’re a full-equity partnership, we’re looking for natural owners – so we “buy” equity partners for the long term and don’t rent salaried/fixed-share partners for short-term gain. “Buying in” entirely new business lines through individual lateral hiring is fraught with danger.’
Brandon argues that lateral hires fail because not enough planning takes place at the onset; fundamental questions about what the firm is trying to achieve through a lateral hire remain unanswered. For example, firms may say they want to hire a corporate partner with a client following to bring in more corporate revenue without determining exactly how that revenue will come in to the firm – ie which clients the firm is going to target and what sectors will it try to get more heavily involved in.
‘If you don’t understand your own business effectively, how can you be expected to hire into it through anything other than a spin of a roulette wheel?’ he says. ‘I’ve seen a lot of what I call the “7th Calvary” phenomenon: firms saying they’ll hire a corporate partner with a big client following. What planet are these firms on?’
‘The most challenging question is when we ask firms what they have to offer the incoming partner,’ says Mark Husband, managing director of Cogence Search. ‘Do you have a volume of client business that isn’t being serviced?’
For Nick Shilton, chief executive of Shilton Sharpe Quarry, some firms have learned from past mistakes, others have not.
Case study: Lateral hiring at Clyde & Co
Clyde & Co has hired 18 laterals a year on average since 2008, while partner profits grew 5% from 2008-13. During the most recent financial year the firm hired 23 partners, including disputes specialist Margaret Tofalides from Manches and an insurance team from DAC Beachcroft in Madrid.
According to senior partner James Burns, the firm uses a standardised global recruitment programme based on set recruitment initiatives directed from its regional boards. There are four in total covering the US, Canada, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, with the UK separately managed. These boards consider what the firm needs and where it is needed, and interviews candidates at a regional level. ‘Our regional boards are closest to the clients in their areas so have the best understanding of their needs,’ says Burns. ‘The main board sets clear parameters and disciplines, but it is up to the partnership broadly and the regional boards to orchestrate developments.’
Last year, the firm hired across its insurance/reinsurance practice group, while projects and construction was active in the UK and the Middle East, and more recently in Asia-Pacific. ‘We are expanding in Asia-Pacific, with one area of priority being our projects and construction practice, so that is a message we sent to recruiters,’ says Burns.
Once a year, the firm delivers a presentation that identifies its core business objectives to a varied group of recruiters, so a message can be put out in the market. However, quite often, the firm may not use any consultants at all. ‘We have a central recruitment team who deal with recruiters rather than individual partners. Each year we present to agencies on our strategy, developments in our business and our priorities.’
‘The economic downturn led to some firms becoming more demanding as far as their lateral recruitment processes are concerned,’ he says. ‘The process certainly became longer and a number of them became more exacting. We are in the new normal: while the economy has recovered to a certain extent, most firms are not going to slacken their lateral recruitment processes, although others have become more relaxed again. It took a long time to get lateral partner deals done during the downturn – things are now moving at a quicker pace generally.’
The reality is that very few law firms have the streamlined process for recruitment to run properly; there are so many vested interests in the lateral movement process that it frequently becomes incredibly cumbersome. Too often it becomes a considerable exercise in consensus building.
For many, the answer lies in firms being more rigorous in the process of hiring laterals but that brings its own problems – firms have introduced templates for recruitment which ostensibly give rigour but also narrow the execution of the process, meaning it can become a box-ticking exercise rather than assessing the cultural impact of the hire.
One sure-fire route to failure is to throw too much money at a problem, particularly in the form of financial guarantees. It creates a safety net that does little to incentivise the incoming partner to be ambitious or to fully integrate with existing partners. And nothing upsets the current partnership and aspiring partners more than seeing an underperforming lateral sitting at the top of the equity with a guaranteed £1m in annual drawings for the next three years. Until relatively recently, Berwin Leighton Paisner was generally regarded as one of the most upwardly mobile practices outside London’s top ten and was known to offer guaranteed pay deals above its core equity ladder for some high-profile partner recruits. While the aggressive recruitment strategy worked well in a number of cases – notably in its core real estate practice – the results have long been viewed as mixed in corporate and finance, as evidenced by the swathe of partner exits from those practice areas in the last 18 months.
And using guaranteed lateral hire packages to lure high-billing rainmakers as part of an over-ambitious expansion plan has frequently been attributed as being at the root of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s downfall in the more detailed post-mortems of the firm’s epic demise.
‘There’s a lot more caution about guarantees now,’ says Chris Cayley, EMEA managing director at Laurence Simons. ‘Many more firms who are active in the lateral market want people to back themselves to deliver.’
Still, the consensus view is that, sparingly used in clearly defined circumstances, there is a place for income guarantees.
Melinda Wallman, head of the EMEA partner practice group at Major, Lindsey & Africa, comments: ‘Firms will generally provide a guarantee when hiring for an office opening or practice launch. If a firm really wants someone, they will do whatever it takes to get them within the parameters of their systems… candidates also need to ask firms how many outstanding guarantees they have. If they are being offered a guarantee then the chances are they are not alone. As Dewey showed us, there is real risk in outstanding guarantees. In most situations, we do not encourage candidates to take guarantees – integration works best when risk is shared.’
Case study: Lateral hiring at Latham & Watkins
Latham & Watkins has been extremely active in the top end of the lateral market in London, hiring Clifford Chance’s private equity team, global head David Walker, co-head of the Africa group Kem Ihenacho and private equity partner Tom Evans in the space of a year.
Robin Barnes, the firm’s UK lateral partner recruiting manager is seen by many as key to Latham’s success in the lateral market, which has also seen former Herbert Smith Freehills’ co-chair of the corporate fraud department Simon Bushell join the firm last year along with Norton Rose Fulbright’s head of derivatives, Dean Naumowicz. This is a firm that, according to recruitment consultants, ‘gets its man’.
London managing partner Nick Cline is keen to play down the idea of relying too much on lateral recruitment to build the business. ‘It can be very effective, especially in order to enhance market strength with focused and high-quality hires but you have to strike the right balance. We promote to the partnership more than we recruit externally and will always have progression and opportunity for existing Latham lawyers front of mind when we are looking at strengthening from outside. That said, we’re always on the lookout for talented lawyers,’ he says.
Cline’s response reveals a great deal about the culture of the firm and marks it out from other high-flying, big-spending US firms. ‘Having a considered strategy is key, as is the emphasis on maintaining the collegial strengths of the firm. Candidates must be as right for us as we are for them,’ says Cline.
Latham as a firm has a long-held reputation for being the more collegiate and long term of the firms at the apex of the global food chain. Until relatively recently, the firm was known for its unanimously collaborative approach to lateral recruitment – no-one would join the firm unless every partner agreed to the hire.
Latham is clearly not afraid to pay for talent. That said, the firm does not offer guaranteed remuneration packages.
Judging a lateral’s success differs at Latham compared to other firms who look at key performance indicators and compare them to the original business plan drawn up before the hire. Cline says: ‘There are obviously many different metrics which can be applied, but a hire has probably been successful when they are no longer thought of as “lateral”.’
The good, the bad and the ugly
So what makes a successful lateral hire? According to Osborne Clarke’s chief executive, Simon Beswick, it is a straightforward but non-scientific assessment. ‘We aim for a lateral hire success rate greater than two-thirds. Success rate is measured by whether the partner is there three years on, how does what they’re bringing in compare to their peers, what is their other contribution? Just looking at financials is too short-sighted, and just looking at cultural fit is too cuddly.’
Allen & Overy (A&O) (see boxout) is an outlier compared to Magic Circle rivals Linklaters and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, having a far less conservative approach to lateral recruitment (although still below average for the top 50 as a whole). But interestingly, while A&O outperformed its two rivals for revenue and revenue per lawyer (RPL) growth between 2008 and 2013, its performance in profit per equity partner (PEP) terms is the worst of the group, down 7% over the same period.
Clyde & Co’s (see boxout) lateral recruitment rate relative to the size of its partnership over five years is above average at 6%. While its financial performance was enhanced by its 2011 merger with Barlow Lyde & Gilbert, the firm has still managed to raise profit levels as well as revenues alongside a healthy lateral recruitment process. Another firm with a strong insurance focus, Kennedys, has also been active in the lateral recruitment market and enjoyed considerable financial success in the last five years, with PEP having increased 49% since 2008.
But financial performance at firms is affected by so many variables and one conclusion that can most definitely be drawn is above average lateral recruitment is no guarantee of financial success. Research by Zorn and Henderson along with The American Lawyer, published earlier this year, argues that lateral hiring is destabilising US firms – the most profitable firms in the US see very little partner churn on average – and the authors were unable to find a clear relationship between a lateral partner hiring strategy and higher law firm profitability.
However, many firms in the LB100 suffered material drops in revenue post-Lehman and many have looked to lateral recruitment as a way of positioning their firms to gain market share when the economy picks up. ‘We had a change of approach when I took over as managing partner and stepped up lateral hiring,’ says Simmons managing partner Jeremy Hoyland. ‘We had 20 laterals last year, we’ve been maintaining it. I’m a fan of it. It’s important for a firm like us because we are seeking to accelerate our growth and in particular we want to do it in very focused ways along our sector strategy, we’re looking for individual capability in individual markets so we’re looking to cherry-pick where we can the right individuals who will add to the practice.’
And some firms that have historically shied away from lateral recruitment in the past have taken great strides. In the most recent financial year, Macfarlanes hired three times the number of laterals it typically takes on in a year – up from two to six.
‘We have made more lateral hires in recent years than we have done historically because we needed to change the shape of the practice,’ says senior partner Charles Martin. ‘Being prepared to hire laterally was essential because to have achieved that amount of change organically would have taken a decade. In a much more fast-moving market you need to be prepared to do things that you wouldn’t normally do.’
Temporary solutions – the rise of interim recruitment
Recruitment specialists widely report the temporary recruitment market is flourishing within the legal profession, particularly at associate level. Figures from HR consultancy Adecco show that contract recruitment in the legal industry has grown year-on-year, up 10% compared to permanent roles, which are down by the same amount. In the City, it is up nearly 20% year-on-year.
While the temporary recruitment market has existed since the 1990s, its reputation in the boom years was tarnished by a perceived lack of quality lawyers.
During the downturn, the multiple redundancy rounds meant fee-earner levels were hit hard at the same time firms were trying to take on as much work as possible. When demand started to gradually come back again for legal services, firms were left with skeleton crews.
‘The interim market proper was born at that point,’ says Matt Franklin, who joined Shilton Sharpe Quarry in 2012 to establish SSQ Interim Solutions, its contract and temporary recruitment division. ‘Law firms started to experience an increase in work and there were suddenly a lot of very good people on the market who were willing to come in on a temporary or fixed-term basis.’ What’s happened is this has now become the norm – firms are now running at around 1% of qualified lawyers as a flexible resource. It’s picked up out of necessity as work has carried on growing.’
Franklin believes the increasing popularity of the resource means that firms will have around 5% of their fee-earners recruited on an interim basis in the medium term.
‘Law firms have woken up to this idea that the interim model is here to stay. Partners can see the benefits of it in terms of cost – you can fluctuate your resource depending on the demands of the work and avoid having an underused workforce during quieter periods. However, firms couldn’t do that if the quality of candidates wasn’t out there.’
While the sweet spot for temporary lawyers is typically for those between two to four years PQE, those drawn to interim recruitment are becoming increasingly senior. ‘Older partners can still deliver and might want the freedom as a non-executive or consultant,’ says Colin Jones from Eximius Law.
Some firms use their alumni (Allen & Overy’s Peerpoint being one such example) to have a temporary resource available.
‘There has been a change in recent years in the traditional approach of all lawyers being engaged on employment contracts. As a firm we always look at new ways of recruiting talent, and the temporary market is no exception,’ says Jeremy Hoyland, managing partner of Simmons & Simmons. ‘This is something we are exploring more, in common with the wider market trend’.
Hiring outlook
Overall, our table shows that lateral hiring is in a modest decline after some very frothy years post-Lehman. This is supported by evidence supplied by the recruitment industry: data from market intelligence firm LegalMonitor shows that UK lateral partner hiring across five key practice areas (corporate, banking, energy/projects, litigation and real estate) among the top 50 firms by revenue in the UK was down nearly a third to 94 in 2013 from a high of 136 in 2011. In addition, HR consultancy company Adecco says that permanent recruitment is down 11% across the legal sector as a whole in the UK and 12% in London.
‘We’re roaring back but although I’ve never had as many assignments as I have in any one quarter, I don’t think we’re back to pre-bust days,’ says Jones. ‘Last year was challenging. You made money but you had to work at it. Now there’s more of a feelgood factor.’
Shilton says that while some may talk down the overall number of lateral hires being made it is about where the recruitment is happening that matters. ‘I’m sure the stats in themselves are right but you have to look at certain sectors of the market. If you look at the number of partners working in the London offices of US firms compared to five or ten years ago, the direction of traffic is pretty clear.’
Aligned to the lateral recruitment approach of the US elite in London (see box, ‘Chasing Alpha’) is an unmistakeable sense that high-impact lateral hires at the top end rose significantly in 2013/14 – that the big-name lateral hire is back with a vengeance. Kirkland & Ellis’ hire last month of Lucas may be the latest trophy hire but add to that list David Walker from Clifford Chance to Latham; Andrew Wilkinson from Goldman Sachs to Weil Gotshal; Stephen Lloyd from Ashurst to A&O; and Linklaters’ private equity duo Ian Bagshaw and Richard Youle joining White & Case and you have one of the most memorable periods for brand name recruitment in some time.
The size of remuneration package has also increased with the status of the recruits. ‘I have seen certain top-end candidates move in the last six months on packages worth up to $4m,’ says Shilton.
Nonetheless, the jury is most definitely still out on the success that lateral recruitment can bring. It is clear that even a star-name hire is no guarantee of success, certainly not financially. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game – the 2003 book by Michael Lewis – looks at how Oakland Athletics baseball team’s general manager Billy Beane used a completely different approach to analysing player data to assemble a competitive team, despite Oakland’s relatively meagre financial resources. Beane selected players that performed well across certain metrics that did not come at a premium price.
It will be interesting to see if a Moneyball school of law firm recruitment will eventually emerge: an approach that would require a law firm to build a sizeable pool of data to analyse and benchmark potential recruits and feed in a number of variables that speak to the long-term value of a potential partner hire. While it is conceded that law firms’ hiring processes have in general improved – there is little sign yet of law firms amassing the data and specialist skills needed for such an approach.
The focus on high billers – from a firm that has institutional relationships with revenue-generating clients that are not portable – leads to errors of judgement.
It all boils down to a firm’s starting position, according to Jonathan Benjamin, a founding director of RedLaw. ‘The market continues to have firms who are in a strong position to capitalise on the predicted upturn and those in a tougher position,’ he says. ‘The former are often clearer on strategy and why they are specifically hiring. Those firms are normally much more successful in the longevity of lateral hire partners as that clarity and direction comes through during the interview process. Other firms continue to hire based on short-term needs of purely increasing revenue. This strategy or, perhaps lack of strategy, is a roll of the dice as it’s wholly dependent on that person’s business case and less focus is given to integration, cultural fit and long-term shared vision.’
This quest for the unobtainable continues but it will require a shift in attitude from firms, says recruitment specialist Dominique Graham, director at Graham Gill. ‘Nowadays firms want partners that can walk on water and not make a splash,’ she says. ‘The firms’ definition of “quality” seems to have focused rather worryingly around immediate portable following, which can be off-putting to those that genuinely have the portable client base, but attract those that are more mercenary in their approach. Regardless, and whatever the market dynamics, self-standing partners are a rare phenomenon in the London market, let alone moveable ones.’
The consensus view is that a more sceptical and experienced legal profession has become more sophisticated and effective at the partner recruitment game. But as confidence returns – and increasingly mobile, free-agent partners size up their options – the phenomena of the short-term partner hire will surely return at many firms. LB
jaishree.kalia@legalease.co.uk, mark.mcateer@legalease.co.uk
Methodology
LB compiled a table showing the lateral hires made each financial year from 2008/09 to present for a select group of 40 firms taken from the top 50 of the 2013 Legal Business 100.
All data, including financial information, is based on information supplied by firms for the LB100.
Lateral hires data for the most recent financial year (2013/14) was supplied by firms directly for the purposes of this report.
While we have asked for data relating to pure lateral partner hires (ie a partner at one firm becoming a partner at another), some firms have included vertical hires (senior associate hired as a partner or partner hired as a consultant) and also partners acquired through merger or acquisition in their totals.
Notes
*1. DLA Piper, Hogan Lovells, Norton Rose Fulbright, Dentons, Herbert Smith Freehills, Clyde & Co, Pinsent Masons, DAC Beachcroft, King & Wood Mallesons SJ Berwin – data for these firms are for the legacy UK firm prior to their mergers.
*2. Taylor Wessing – data for the years 2009/10 and 2010/11 refer to the UK LLP only.
*3. Wragge & Co merged with Lawrence Graham to become Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co on 1 May 2014.