Lawyer Monthly Magazine - April 2019 Edition

APR 2019 38 Special Feature www. lawyer-monthly .com advantage of working with an experienced headhunter, who is not tied to a specific law firm, is that he/she should be able to provide an honest and independent assessment of each firm under consideration. Further, many partners over- inflate their business plans. It should be no surprise to anyone when they don’t produce the numbers. This practice has been going on for years. If this is the main reason for a partner being shown the door, then clearly the law firm must share much of the blame, either for being too gullible, for a lack of scrutiny or both. There are many parts and people involved in making a lateral partner hire a success. There is no one solution to improving your churn. It’s too simplistic to suggest that more due diligence will improve matters. All it takes is one weak link to frustrate any progress made in other areas. If you are a partner at a law firm that prefers honest, informed, fact-based recruitment advice and you areconsidering your next career move in private practice, then in the first instance, you should contact my colleague Mairi MacLean by email at mm@ macleanlegalsearch.com. LM Bringing Overseas Partners Back The main problems being that 1) the partner will generally have no local clients or portable business and 2) returning to a much larger London office from the comparative calm of a much smaller overseas office. Promoting Senior Associates to Partner Around a quarter of the failed hires analysed represent lawyers moving to a law firm as a partner for the first time. Offering the carrot of partnership to high-quality senior associates passed over at their current firms has only been a recruitment strategy of the last 15-20 years, when locksteps used to be more rigid (equity only) and salaried partners weren’t so common. Often, it is used when a firm either can’t afford or doesn’t want to pay top dollar for existing partners. Plenty of these hires are successful, but it is worth noting that two things can go wrong for the hiring firm: • The lawyer uses the firm as a stepping stone principally to gain the title of partner and leverage their standing in the marketplace. See section above, “Failed Partner Hires Trading up”. • There is less evidence available regarding business and client development, so the candidate’s fee-earning ability is based more on potential than fact. Team Moves If a partner arrived at their current firm as part of a team, or had developed a strong working relationship with other partners, then there would be an added pressure to consider moving if other partners in the team were keen to do so, even though you may not have been long onside. To Summarise Partners exit law firms prematurely for many different reasons as listed above. Some are pushed and some leave on their own terms. The negative impact of losing partners before time is not just borne by the law firms but also by the candidates, as my research shows. What hasn’t changed in 20 years of working in legal recruitment is that partner churn, above and beyond that which is expected, remains an expensive problem for many law firms. Most of the reasons for partner hires failing are law firm-related, down to market forces or both. However, candidates should also share some of the blame. They have a responsibility to do their own due diligence. One ABOUT FRASER MACLEAN Fraser MacLean first started working in legal recruitment in 1999. His background is atypical for this sector; he has an Engineering degree, he trained as a Chartered Accountant, worked as an analyst for a French multi- national, partnered with his father on various commer- cial ventures and studied for an MBA. He believes in an analytical, collabora- tive, plain-speaking and jargon free approach to recruitment and business in general.