Invisible Advocates: The Silent Struggles of Legal Recruiters

 

Candidates need you to get the job, and you can bond with them when they need assistance. However, they often forget about you. Most candidates who secure a job opt out of receiving emails from recruiters, and you only hear from them when they need a job – and sometimes not even then because they find positions on LinkedIn, through other recruiters, or from friends. Some recruiters are used only as a last resort. When it comes to law firms, it's more of the same, but often even worse. Recruiters are also used as a last resort here. Law firms sometimes resent them because of their fees and play all sorts of games to avoid using them. These days, law firms often try to avoid paying fees and may even cheat recruiters. They are selective about which recruiters they use and may play favorites.

 

The Harsh Reality of Being a Legal Recruiter

I got into this business because I was unhappy practicing law. A man named "Ted" used to call me and other associates around Los Angeles when I was a young attorney. He would laugh, say he heard that I was "a good-looking guy," and he'd offer to help me get an interview with a big law firm. He was a wonderful person, full of love and joy, hailing from Chicago. He was short and stocky, with a background in wrestling. There was another guy in his office that he trained, another Jewish guy who said, "You may have heard of me. My name is 44."

From Associate to Recruiter: The Early Lessons of Ted

Ted was one of the first recruiters I hired when I started my firm. I found him an office in Orange County right next to his gym. His office even had a small bathroom. He didn't make many placements for me and barely covered his expenses. He wasn't the only recruiter working for me when he died. I discovered a couple of years before his death that he had been living in the office and showering at his gym, where he also exercised and lifted weights daily. I said nothing when I found out he lived in the office. I figured it out because someone else was working there, and they told me he had all his clothes and possessions there when he died. When Ted passed away, his daughter and other family members kept calling the office looking for a big placement he had told them he was going to make. Ted always talked about making a big placement, but they never materialized. It's often like this with many recruiters. That's just how it works.
 
Ted was married to his fourth wife when I met him, but when he experienced a dry spell in recruiting, his wife left him and divorced him. The same thing happened to me with my first wife. Legal recruiting is like that – recruiters go through dry spells, and the people we support don't feel secure. Less than a year into our marriage and seven months into my recruiting career, she found an older man in his forties who was very wealthy, had just sold a business for $100 million, and lived in a compound in Malibu. She started living with him while we were still married. When I got upset with her before she divorced me, she told me that he was wealthy and would "take me out" because he knew many bad people from a check cashing chain he had invested in Las Vegas. When she divorced me, she hired Bruce Jeffer, and the man paid for it. Bruce Jeffer owned a 150-person law firm in Malibu called Jeffer Mangles.

 

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The Recruiter’s Personal Cost: Marriage, Money, and Meaning

When I recruited Ted to work for me, I drove out to Newport Beach, and he took me to the office he was leaving. He introduced me to the three or four other recruiters in his office. It was a sad sight – three or four sad-looking men in their late forties to early fifties who spent their days cold calling. When I asked Ted about them after we left the office, he told me that none had made more than one placement in the past six months – one hadn't made any placements in over a year. They just sat there day after day, being disrespected by the people they were cold calling and then by the law firms that knew they were desperate and disrespected them too. It's been so long since I was in that office; I'm sure they are likely no longer with us.
 
Ted was extremely excited the day I sent a girl from my office to deliver a signed lease to his landlord. She also took him out to an office furniture store and bought him a new desk for his office, a nice chair, furniture for his small waiting room, and some file cabinets. She also bought him a new computer, monitor, and phone. Ted called me after this and said how nice it was and that no one had ever bought him new office furniture. He was probably in his late forties and very happy about this. He'd been a recruiter for over 20 years.
 
It has been a long time now, but Ted and the people he worked with back then were nice guys. Ted trained the guy who recruited me from Quinn Emanuel. The cutest girl in my law school class had gone to a firm called Dewey Ballantyne. She was a beautiful girl from Vermont and stood out at the University of Virginia Law School. I had a girlfriend, and I'm sure the girl from Vermont was taken too, but we had a moment. It was in an elevator, and she said something, I said something back, there was chemistry – and I knew that this was something I wanted. I heard she had gone to a law firm called Dewey Ballantyne, and I wanted to find her. To preserve my self-esteem if she ever were to Google her name and read this, I will call her "the Girl in the Elevator."
 
When Ted's trainee called me, I told him that after he gained my confidence, I felt like he could be my advocate: "The only firm I will consider is Dewey Ballantyne."
 
I had no idea why. All I knew was that this was a good firm, I felt something from this girl who called me, and I wanted to find her. I imagined us together, a more perfect picture of myself. I was lost and needed something.
 
I got an interview with Dewey Ballantyne. I went into my initial interview and met with Lee Smalley Edmund. She was the president of the Los Angeles County Bar Association, patrician, and very respectable in all respects. I remembered that my grandfather had gone to the University of Michigan and had been in the same fraternity as John Dewey – the founder of the firm and a former presidential candidate. When I was young and told my father I might want to one day be a lawyer, my grandfather said, "If he wants to be a lawyer, he should try to work at John Dewey's firm." I told her about my grandfather, she smiled, sighed, and I felt like Dewey Ballantyne had already hired me.
 
That firm, whether it was the girl in the elevator or my grandfather, suddenly had a sense of importance that I needed to follow. Things got bad near the end of my second round of interviews with a very uptight associate. The senior associate was very serious and didn't have much of a personality. Sitting on his bookshelf, right behind where he sat, was a large textbook called "PRINCIPLES OF ANAL MEDICINE: VOLUME 3." This book itself was so massive that I couldn't even imagine the volumes that would have come before or after this. It was the size of a phone book. His face was all scrunched up and red, he was wearing a pink shirt and a tie, he had large glasses, and he was very serious. He looked like a scrunched-up anus and had taken on the personality of Volume 3. He looked at my resume and said, "It says here you graduated in June – my brother went to the University of Virginia Law School. Isn't their graduation in May?" He seemed upset, like a man with a serious hemorrhoid – he was red, scrunched up in the eyes, and appeared ready to burst.
 
You would have thought I had just lied about committing a murder and had been outed for something so horrific. There was complete silence, and my interviewer wasn't happy to have found this out but was shocked and appalled. I suddenly felt all the enthusiasm I had fade away as the air was sucked out of the room, the blood rushed out of my face, and I felt prickles all over my body.
 
"Yes, I graduated in May," I said.
 
The associate said he had to excuse himself, left the room with my resume, and I sat there with an ashen face for several minutes, terrified but also wanting more than anything to pick up Volume 3 and see what sort of content was inside. Eventually, a very professional member of the human resources team at the firm showed up and escorted me out the door as if I had never stepped foot in the firm.
 
When I arrived at the parking garage, I called Ted's contact, who reassured me, saying, "Don't worry, I know exactly what to do. I will tell them that we retyped your resume and made this error. I'll see what I can do to fix this. This is bad!"
 
I left there feeling that I had really blown it this time, and all hopes and dreams for this firm were gone. A few weeks passed until my recruiter called me and said that the firm's hiring partner would like to meet me for a drink on a Friday afternoon at a restaurant in the lobby of the nicest building in Downtown Los Angeles. I was nervous, and the day before, I purchased a nice pair of pants from Macy's and had the pants tailored. Quinn Emanuel, at the time, had no dress code, so I had only jeans, khakis, and similar clothes that I was confident would not even work for casual Friday drinks—at a formal steakhouse on the Ground Floor of the nicest building in downtown Los Angeles.
 
I showed up, and the hiring partner made some small talk and said they were "prepared to forget" what had happened with the "error" on my resume—after I spent 15 minutes apologizing for not catching the error I ostensibly had not even seen my recruiter make. He said, "I should always check the work of people turning in work on my behalf," and seemed very serious about this. I was so young and terrified that I agreed with him.
 
He indicated that he would “see what he could do” about an offer from the firm.
 
When the offer came, I told Ted that the timing did not seem right because I was about to get a Christmas Bonus at my current firm. "What if I send you $10,000 after Dewey pays us our $30,000 fee?” Ted asked.
 
I told him this was fine and went to work at Dewey Ballantyne.
 
A few months later, I found myself in New York City spending a week with all the other new associates of the firm, which culminated in going to the firm’s annual Christmas Party at the Plaza Hotel. I walked in, sat down, and within a few moments saw none other than Heather White, who ran up to me and hugged me as if we were long-lost friends. In truth, we had never socialized or spoken in law school, apart from a few brief moments in an elevator going to the ground floor from the two-story law school building—no more than 15 seconds or so.
 
I sat down with her and learned she was in the trust and estates department of the firm. She was seated next to someone, presumably her boss, a handsome, young blonde man who admired her.
 
After several minutes of conversation, she told me that she was now married to a guy with the most Irish-sounding last name imaginable, a trader, and I was out of luck and too late to the race. A few moments later, still stunned by this news— “Look how much I did for you to get here!”—the lights were darkened for some sort of announcement, and I scurried over to my assigned seat.
 
I eventually left Dewey Ballantyne. When I was unhappy at the firm and quit—largely because it was inexplicably the most uptight group of people I had ever encountered then—or 25 years later, since—in the entire United States (not just California), they suggested I stay on for three months and talk to other firms if I was unhappy. The hiring partner of the firm stopped by my office and said, "I'm sure you could go across the street to Latham, or 'one of those other Los Angeles firms' if you want. Don't quit without lining up another job, though, because firms will think you were fired."
 
I did not talk to Ted then, and I am glad I did not. However, I think Dewey might have told him I was unhappy and looking for a job because he started leaving me message after message.

 

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How Legal Recruiting Took Over My Life

After weeks of interviewing, talking to recruiters, and realizing that I loved the business more than practicing law, I opened my own recruiting firm with very little idea of how I would support myself or my new wife. I did this approximately two months into our new marriage—she thought she had married a lawyer, and now this. I had several hundred thousand dollars in business at the time and ended up giving it all away after a few weeks because all I wanted to do was recruit. I gave a lot away to recruit—not just my marriage. A few years into recruiting, I was admitted to Stanford Business School to my astonishment, and after enrolling and starting classes, withdrew and quit from there too because I realized my recruiting business would crash if I left it. If I had followed through with that, I probably would have a much different and better career than recruiting today.
 
For the first four months, I put my entire body, mind, and soul into the business. I had a $17,500 home equity loan from a mobile home lender, the only company I could find to make me a loan to start my own business. I worked from the moment I got up (usually those days around 5:00 am) until I no longer had the energy to work anymore—usually late into the evening. I had never been so enthusiastic about anything in my life. This was different. I felt a control over the lives of others and their destinies unlike anything I had ever felt before in my life. I knew this was my calling, and I did not know why. I kept fighting for my candidates, trying to make law firms like me, and doing everything I could to change their lives and help them find positions.
 
I had been doing this for four months, eating up most of my savings, and feeling lost. My new wife was spending a lot of time visiting her family and landscaping architecture employer in New York, a new "client" of the New York business in Malibu. I could tell she thought I was losing my mind and would be divorcing me soon.
 
One Monday morning while I was busy recruiting away at 6:00 am, an effervescent Spaniard legal recruiting coordinator I enjoyed speaking with, Pilar, called me from Latham and Watkins in Palo Alto. I enjoyed speaking with her about her life, how she rode a motorcycle to work from San Francisco across the Bay Bridge each morning to avoid the traffic. In those days and those to follow, I became close to countless recruiters in firms all over California. We would often speak about the mundane for hours at a time and enjoy the break from the seriousness of our jobs. We would talk about our families, vacations, home improvement, and more. Only 45 minutes into these conversations, when someone had to go, would something be brought up about hiring, who was going to get interviewed, and so forth. I had genuine connections with people inside the firms and miss that dearly. We were advocates for each other. My career started by understanding and appreciating the people inside law firms doing the recruiting. The further I have moved from this, the sadder and less connected I have felt.
 
“Early enough for you?” Pilar asked.
 
She made an offer to a candidate of mine, which became the start of BCG Attorney Search. By the end of that week, I had made four placements, and my business never looked the same. A few months later, I had moved out of my house to a large office in downtown Los Angeles. Then I moved to a larger office.

 

The Cycles of Growth, Loss, and Reinvention

I realized a year or so into this, however, that the legal recruiting business was something where the revenues were completely unpredictable. The first shock came in around November of 2000. The dot com boom that got my business off to such an amazing start started to implode. I tracked all of my interviews on a calendar on a wall in our break room. All of a sudden, they just stopped. I started speaking with law firms, and they told me that all of their deal flow had stopped. All of my interviews in the Bay Area at every firm just came to a screeching halt. Then everything slowed down, and by March of that year, I was convinced I was going out of business—it was frightening. There was no revenue coming in the door, and I did not know what to do.
 
I remembered that when I had essentially gotten fired from my federal judicial clerkship, the incredible success I had sending out 100 or so letters to law firms in Los Angeles seeking a position. Using a Martindale Hubble database that allowed me to search all over the United States by practice area and location, I assumed I could give attorneys and law students seeking positions the same success I had as well. With very little time to spare, I launched a business called "Legal Authority" that helped people send out letters to firms after recent law school graduates I had hired spoke to them, then I had separate people redo their resumes and cover letters and started the business. It worked—and worked quickly, and the business took off. With the dot com implosion putting tens of thousands of attorneys out of work, the business grew quickly.
 
Soon after that, I decided I was going to start another business to find jobs for attorneys and research them online. Law firms were starting to post their jobs online, and companies were doing the same. My idea was that I would go to all of these legal employer websites and find the jobs, edit the jobs, and make them live for attorneys and law students to view. This business took off. Before long, I had 20,000 members paying $29.95 a month to view my jobs. Not long after that, I started a student loan company and started consolidating loans for all of the attorneys in my databases. Then, not too long after that, I launched websites to start doing the same thing in other industries, and before long, I had a big business that was growing like mad.
 
Then I bought an entire floor of a building for $6,000,000. Then I bought the entire building next door. Then I bought a giant warehouse to help me mail tens of thousands of letters daily to law firms. I started splurging on things like ridiculous cars, houses, and more ridiculous houses still.
 
About 15 years into this excess, I had begun to go off the rails. I think I was hoping for this all to end or make sense of it. I had a law firm in Los Angeles hire a candidate of mine from New York, move her out here after she quit her job, and then forget to do a "conflicts check" on her. When I asked the law firm about this, they said that the person in charge had made a mistake and joked she was "ditzy." I was in a bad mood and wrote an article where I said people in recruiting departments were "occasionally ditzy," and I also recounted many of the stereotypes of recruiting departments that had existed in the past. This was a mistake. I was biting the hand that fed me. Probably because a part of me wanted the insanity to stop—how else do you explain such reckless, stupid, and insensitive behavior?
 
When that happened, I sent out an apology letter to several law firms that I believed might have been offended by this. I will never forget the response from Latham & Watkins: "Don't worry about it." The people who had initially put me on the map were willing to look the other way when I fell on my face. As a firm founded by former fighter pilots, their lineage understood that mistakes happen during a war, but your long-term mission and what you stand for mean more than any mistakes that may occur along the way.
 
I always believed my mission was to help people find jobs and never wavered from that, but things seemed to be getting increasingly difficult. Recruiters would steal from me, people were vilifying me, and I did not know what to do. I did not have the tools to help myself, and everyone seemed to want a piece of me—employees, lawyers, people on opposite sides of deals—everywhere I turned, people wanted something. I got so scared of all of this, I felt that it was time I started looking out for myself. I did not realize I needed connection. I thought I needed things and status to make me happy.
 
When I started buying houses, cars, and stuff for myself and not doing things just for the business, that's when I started to get unhappy. I did not drink but started to drink.
 
My first day in a 12,000 square foot, 100-year-old Mansion I bought with my second wife, I was more depressed than I had ever been. The home had murals painted on the ceilings, had been opened as an attraction/museum a few years before I bought it, had koi ponds, giant saltwater fish tanks, and everything you can imagine. I sent my designer to an auction to buy $150,000 worth of giant rugs for this monstrosity two weeks before I moved in. The home had hundreds of thousands of dollars in furniture I bought for it.
 
At this point, I had something like 850 employees. I had not drunk in a year or so, but the night I bought that house, I went out and got so drunk that by 8:00 pm, I was passed out. My first night under the mirrors of the giant canopy bed, which must have weighed 2,500 pounds, was spent passed out.
 
The further I moved away from the people who made me successful— the people inside of law firms— the more isolating my job became. It became about numbers, people's raises, working with systems, trying to make the most people happy, and keeping my own shit together in the face of chaos. I built everything up very fast by connecting with people inside law firms, and the further I got away from this, the more I became removed from myself and others. The more unhappy I became.
 
A year or so after moving into this epic home in Pasadena, I decided it was not epic enough and my ego was still not satisfied. I had a brand-new Rolls Royce Phantom sitting in my driveway in Pasadena that may have been the only one in the city. I drove it one mile to my office and back each day. That too was sad. I was reaching for connection with things because I had become disconnected from the business and people.
 
When I got to work, all I perceived was conflict. People trying to sue me, cheat me, take my ideas, and start competing businesses—it seemed like it never ended. I sued ten people over three years in my warehouse, claiming injuries. It got so bad that I had to install cameras in every square inch of the warehouse to protect myself. People still figured out how to get "injured" in areas with no candidates—often in the middle of the night. They would claim soft tissue-type injuries that could not be proven and would require months of treatment from chiropractors.
 
At some point, a few years into this, I closed the warehouse. Within several months, people broke into the warehouse and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment.
 
Because none of this was working— the buildings, the employees, the 11,000 square foot house for my wife and me, the $3,000,000 weekend home I bought in Malibu, and more. I needed something different. I did not know what was wrong, but I knew it was not working.
 
When I married my second wife, I converted to Judaism. I thought that would make me happy— that did not work either. The idea of having a connection with something larger than myself drove me. I took classes with my fiancée for nearly a year, and we spent every Sunday in class. The classes were something that brought us together. The Rabbi who taught them was very nice and committed to the religion. I admired his commitment. He talked about how when he was in college, he was on a tour of Europe and was visiting a small Polish town and was taken to a small town where there was only one Jewish temple to visit. He learned when he got there that the man showing him the temple and taking care of it was the only Jewish man in the area. He had been caring for the temple and the only Jew anywhere close by. He said that when he saw this and what it represented, he decided that if one man could be so devoted to a religion where there were no members, he could become a Rabbi. He also realized right then that he would help people learn about Judaism so the religion would not decline as he had seen in that small town.
 
As my recruiting business expanded, it also went through periods of contraction. Some of the first recruiters that I hired soon started betraying me. I became an expert in attracting candidates through advertising, search engines, and the content I wrote. As part of my work, I would always assign candidates as they came in the door. Almost all of my recruiters had gone to good law schools, worked in good firms, were either fired or laid off from their firms, were unemployed, and had a difficult time finding new positions—it is never easy. I would then offer them the chance to interview with me for a recruiter position. After feeling unimportant after being let go from firms, I would bring them out to Los Angeles, put them up in good hotels, wine and dine them and then offer most of them positions.
 
When I was a new recruiter, approximately nine months into the new business, there was a meeting of the local legal recruiters' association in Los Angeles. It was held in the conference room of a Regus shared office space office in Century City. There were a bunch of recruiting firm owners who were seated around a large conference room, and I realized quite early on that they were all solo recruiters, or just recruiting with one other recruiter in their office. Many of them had been recruiters since the 1980s and had been in the profession for over 20 years. While they all seemed to be bickering among one another like angry tomcats in the same room, I realized that they all seemed to hate each other because they were competitors. About an hour into the meeting, they also started talking about how they hated recruiters who had worked for them, how impossible it had been for them to hold on to these recruiters, and—incredibly—how several of the people in the room had worked for one another and been in lawsuits against each other before.
 
Several people in the room harped on how difficult it was to have recruiters working for you and how, once they realized this, they were so much happier working alone. Another curious thing I noted was that the longer many of these recruiters had been in the business, the more they sort of "resented" working with associates and held themselves out as being mainly "partner recruiters". Years later, I also noted that these "partner recruiters" generally did not last long in the recruiting business. Once they became partner recruiters, they tended not to last in the business for more than five more years or so. I did not know why, but that seemed to always happen. It was as if once someone became a partner recruiter, they were at the end of their career.
 
I saw this repeatedly, and it is still going on today— it just never seems to stop. The reason is simple: It is difficult doing most partner recruiting because it usually does not work out. You invest weeks, months, or years in recruiting partners and getting them into firms. The problem is that these negotiations do not always work out, and most of the time, these partners will go through friends and other partners they know at other firms. You win a small percentage of the time.
 
I did not realize at that point how difficult and toxic recruiters were with one another when I started in the business; however, I rapidly got a taste of it. I saw early on that if I wanted to remain in the business, I needed to stay away from established recruiters, or experienced ones because none of them seemed happy, committed, or, frankly, all that good at their jobs. Instead, the best insurance was to hire people who were inexperienced, and that is what I did.
 
No one remembers the recruiters in the business anymore. The people I knew in the early 2000s are completely gone or have websites that are the same as they were in the early 2000s. The people I knew in the late 2000s are also largely gone or missing. At some point, the enthusiasm of recruiters dies out, and they simply fade away. Perhaps it is the constant rejection from law firms, the inability to bond with new people who can be recruiters, the inability to stay motivated in the business, and so much more. The daily rejections from law firms and candidates get too much after some time. The betrayal by almost every recruiter you hire and the fact that they end up becoming your enemies—after this goes on long enough, you just end up with no gas left in the tank and are eager to fold up and go home.
 
In most businesses, there is something called "predictable recurring revenue." In law firms, attorneys bill hours, creating predictable revenue. In almost all businesses where goods are sold, there is some sort of predictable revenue. Realtors are always selling homes and handling leases. Car salesmen are constantly selling cars. There is also a vast customer base to sell to. Moreover, there is the "exclusive" nature of needing a car salesman to buy most new cars—car manufacturers only sell to dealerships, and dealerships must employ salesmen to sell new cars. Almost everyone employs realtors to buy and sell homes and manage leases.
 
Legal recruiting, however, has always been much different. While I no longer do it, most legal recruiters only work for the largest law firms. The largest law firms almost always use multiple recruiters for the same positions and recruit on their own—through advertisements, LinkedIn, and simply because candidates are continually applying through their websites. Thus, simply getting a good candidate into a top law firm is not an easy task.
 
For legal recruiters to attract the sorts of associates they are likely to place, they need to be young and hungry and able to bond with young associates—or want to do so with people in their 20s or early 30s. When a recruiter gets into their 40s and 50s, they are over this. Having to sell to young people becomes something they are not interested in doing anymore—it often feels demeaning, very outdated, and not something they have the energy for anymore. It is difficult to identify with someone just starting their career when you are close to ending yours.
 
As if all of this were not enough, the longer the legal recruiter is in the business, the more irrelevant they may become to law firms. When they were young and just starting their careers, they had a lot of energy and enthusiasm and were attractive to large law firms because they could deliver a lot of candidates and be responsive to their requests. As the recruiter ages, they become more irrelevant to these firms.
 
Another byproduct of recruiters aging in the business is that they invariably start to get into lots of disagreements with law firms along the way. The law firms they work for over a few decades get into disputes with them about fees, people leaving, recruiters recruiting for them, and many other things. Because of these conflicts, the law firms stop working with the recruiters—and even though these conflicts are soon forgotten—the recruiter gets stung by so many of these that they lose confidence.
 
Legal recruiting firms also face the issue that because the money coming in to individual recruiters is episodic—they are rarely in a position where they can afford to pay new and existing recruiters ongoing wages that make them motivated to stay put the way most law firms and other organizations do. Therefore, rather than continue to share their commissions with a legal recruiting firm, the recruiter will leave and start their own firm. This sort of thing does not happen, for the most part, with real estate agents because they need a large firm and its signs, the presence of a "broker" and not an "agent"—to operate. Access to the MLS and more. Similarly, anyone wanting to sell new cars needs to work for a dealership that has a franchise with an automotive company. This is just how it works.
 
In legal recruiting, none of this exists. There is nothing to keep recruiters glued to the firms, and the only way this works most of the time is when the recruiting firm is small, and the recruiters there have some sort of relationship with the owner. Otherwise, it is very difficult to make it work—but it does.
 
Faced with a business that is incredibly difficult to scale and keep going, has constant pressure on it that is forcing new blood into the system and pushing out old blood, most recruiters exit the business and most legal recruiting firms die as well. When the recruiting firms die, not many people notice. I've noticed because I'm always watching the people that formerly ran these recruiting firms, and what I see does not make me enthusiastic for the future of the business. In most cases, they exit the business, drastically cut down their expenses, and live out their days not doing much related to legal recruiting.
 
The people who were my heroes in the business 20+ years ago and late in their careers either have died, or they found themselves in lives where they did not have lots of savings and were not nearly as well off as they had been earlier. The most successful recruiter I had known when I was young, I watched throughout the years. He had previously owned and operated one of the largest recruiting firms in the United States. He sold it to a company for "options" that became worthless. Then he tried to restart his recruiting career again and struggled for years to hire experienced recruiters to work for him, and it never worked out—they always were there for a year or two, and then things fizzled out. He tried to recruit me when I was just starting, and I never bit—I was frightened off by his age and lack of understanding of what the business was like now. I suppose that when I get older, I may see the same.
 
When new recruiters were hired, they would most often be enthusiastic, and I would spend a great deal of time talking to them about the business and making them feel welcome in the new business. I often had them live with me for a few months—or longer—and would train them in recruiting. When they had sufficiently learned about the business, I would send them back to the markets they came from, and they would start their new positions with me. Quite often, I would hire multiple recruiters in the same market, and they would all work together.
 
Instead of appreciating my help, the recruiters often became resentful and turned on me—just as their former employers had turned on them. This pattern repeated itself over and over again. They would generally stop returning phone calls, working with candidates, and doing what we asked. After several months, they would then abruptly leave and resign from the position with no notice whatsoever. When they left, they would take the candidates they had ostensibly been assigned and done nothing with and then steal a lot of our law firm and other data when they left. This kept occurring over and over and never stopped after years of doing this.
 
Sometimes they would leave and take other recruiters with them. They would occasionally leave and take other recruiters from our company. When they left, they would set up these small websites of a few pages and put themselves out there as recruiters, expecting candidates to appear. Because the recruiters had always been assigned candidates and our company had also given them jobs, candidates and jobs rarely appeared. When this did not happen, the recruiters would get confused—some would go back to practicing law, others would take positions in other recruiting firms and not last long there because they would be expected to get candidates. Some would go work in career services offices. However, a few of the better recruiters are still in the business—not many, but a few.
 

The Slow Disappearance of Traditional Legal Recruiters

One of the first recruiters I ever hired is someone I also fired because he refused to follow very clear instructions about writing cover letters to the firms, we were submitting candidates to. After a few warnings about this, he was fired. The same day he was fired, he sent out a letter to everyone working in the firm announcing he was starting his firm and even had a website prepared for this that he sent out to everyone in the company. He wanted to continue working with the candidates we sent him when he left the firm and the contacts he made.
 
I had also hired a recruiter I had moved out from New York who had lost his position at a large firm after failing the bar exam. I had moved him out at great expense and had hosted him for a few months in Los Angeles. A short time after I fired the first recruiter, this recruiter announced he was moving to another part of the United States to be closer to family. He said he wanted to recruit from there and continue to work for me. I paid for this move and continued to help him financially. I put him up in an office and paid a few thousand dollars a month for him to be in an office.
 
About six months after he had ostensibly been working in this office, the office called me and said that he had never been there except once when he moved in. After this, they said he had never been seen again. When I asked him about this, he said that he worked there but always kept to himself and that everyone working in the office were friends and he was not part of the social group, and they were calling me because they were jealous.
 
A short time later, I called his office looking for him, and the call was forwarded to someone who answered stating "Legal Recruiting Services" and then continued to ask me where I was looking for a position and similar things. When I called the recruiter on his cell phone and asked him what was happening, he had no satisfactory response, and I fired him. A short time after that, I realized that he had been working for the first recruiter that had been fired working for me.
 
A few years later, I started seeing all sorts of postings online from someone named "Albert"—no one who had ever worked for me—attacking me and going into deeply personal and offensive things against me. These missives went on for some time suddenly started coming up on the top of search engines whenever people spoke about me. When I finally found out who the person was who posted the negative material after an expensive battle with the website where it was posted, I ended up in a multiyear lawsuit with this individual.
 
These sorts of conflicts with former recruiters and even current recruiters continued on and off for years. During the 2008 financial crisis, over 20 recruiters in the company suddenly saw their placement pipelines dry up. At the time, we only did placements at the largest law firms. These firms slowed down during the recession, and with it, so did the placements of these recruiters. Because of this, they got very angry with me, and meetings with them and everyone started quitting and running away. They were angry with me that I did not have the tools to save them from the recession—and back then I did not.
 
When they quit, they would all do the same thing: go back to practicing law or take other positions that were not in the recruiting industry. When this happened, I needed to summon up the energy and just start this repeatedly, as recruiters would leave, and I would need new ones to replace them. It was always the same story: I would bring them in as inexperienced recruiters, they would learn the businesses, and I would make them successful. Other recruiting firms would start reaching out to them, they would start resenting being in a position of sharing their fees, and they would leave. Then, they would go do something else, not last long, and then go to work in a law school or take a recruiting role inside of a law firm. In each case, they were looking to be acknowledged for their recruiting experience, make more money, or find more security.
 
This has not always been the case, however. Some of the best recruiters who worked for me throughout the years learned a lot, were naturally suited to the business, and when they left, they were successful—in one case with their firm, and at least a few others with other firms. Some that left 20 years ago are still in the business; others that left 10 years ago are still in the business—but most are not. Most of the recruiters worked with other recruiting firms, and the good ones who did are still in the business. It is like any business: The best ones continue and remain successful in their new firms.
 
What most of the recruiters who did leave and were successful afterward—as well as many who were not—did was to go back and poach my employees and others in their attempt to benefit themselves. This just happened again and again. So often that this, too, became discouraging. The first recruiter I hired poached someone I hired to work with her; the third recruiter I hired poached someone I hired to work with him; the fifth recruiter I hired poached someone to work with him, and then a bunch of them just kept poaching people again and again. It was as if I was continually hiring people, training them, and then poaching them away to work for others—and then poaching my existing recruiters to do the same. Then they would fail in their new firms and then die away.
 

The Future of Legal Recruiting in a Technological Age

As I have evolved in this business, so has my understanding of it and how to recruit. Most recruiters that are hired continue staying in the same recruiting system they were doing when they started. As the company has evolved and continued to do so technologically, we have developed new methods for the recruiters to do the same. The issue with most recruiters recruiting now and the entire legal recruiting universe is that what they understand now does not evolve to meet the needs of a changing business landscape.
 
For example, when I started in the business, legal recruiters were all cold calling for candidates. Their idea of expanding their business was to hire more recruiters to do more cold calling. They also became reliant on publishing advertisements in local legal newspapers advertising their services. They continued with this business model into the mid-2000s and never came to understand that online job boards and content marketing were the new business model. This droves them out of business eventually.
 
Today, the business model of most legal recruiters relies on a combination of posting on online job boards, Google AdSense, contacting people on LinkedIn, and cold calling. While all of this has worked until now, this is also slowing down. It is essentially a "race to the bottom" because all of these recruiters are competing with large law firms generating their candidates through the same methods—and also with their brands. Everyone has heard of Skadden Arps, and if an attorney wants to work there, they know to go to the law firm's website and apply. Skadden also understands how to recruit on LinkedIn and put ads on Indeed and other sites. Few people think of CITY_NAME Legal Search when looking for a role at Skadden. Most legal recruiters are stuck recruiting for large law firms and involved in a fast race to the bottom.
 
This is what most legal recruiters are doing now. They know only large law firms and these new methods of getting business that did not even exist less than 25 years ago. Legal recruiting did not even exist as a business in the 1970s (it only started in the early 1980s when law firms started poaching people from competitors for the first time) and had a business model based on using the telephone, as computers came on the scene.
 
Now, new business models are evolving and coming into existence—without traditional legal recruiters as involved in the process. For the past 15 years, I have been developing complex databases while other recruiters relied on job boards, LinkedIn, and similar tools for candidates and growth. All the while, these recruiters have been ignoring new technologies such as complex data-driven databases, keeping track of historical placement patterns, and other methods of making placements. They have continued with this now aging business model that no longer relies on large law firms but can now reach out to countless smaller law firms and develop business models based on this. Slowly, these recruiters have started facing an existential threat to their way of doing business that is now catching fire with new ways of doing business that are no longer going to be dependent on online advertising or competing with large law firms for the same pool of candidates these larger law firms are now marketing to and competing with them on a larger, global level.
 
I've been doing this for a few decades now, and it does get tiring, and I have realized how this business goes through ebbs and flows and what it means now. I've been lucky enough to have a technologically-driven recruiting company fighting back against these changes in the industry. I'm watching the business change and seeing how difficult it is likely to become in the future.
 
I have tried to evolve with technologically-driven approaches to enable me to stay productive and do well—unlike the scores of recruiters I saw die last time when they encountered changes and their inability to stay relevant to changes in the industry. I'm watching all of this take place now. In the past year, it has changed as AI and other systems have come into existence. I've realized the power these changes can bring to the business and the 20+ years of data and other information I now have access to that I can use in this new universe. I've realized that I need to do everything differently to survive and keep going in this business another 25 years. I need to run my business as a technology company, not the way recruiting companies operate now.
 
One of the first recruiters I ever hired was someone with an old business model. His name was Brian Siegel, and he was well-known to me because he had written a series of law outlines sold by a major company, he had sold them to when he was younger—Siegel's law outlines. I had met him when he was in his mid-50s and had a very successful run as a legal recruiter. He had come from a company where a woman he was working for had been named one of the top 20 female-led companies in Los Angeles years ago. Her firm was no longer making placements, but his team of a few cold callers and "Team Siegel" was still making placements. I remembered that when I was an associate, he used to send around a mailer to various associates listing all of his placements from the prior year and the year before that. I could not believe it. I saw that one year he had made 22 placements, the next year 29, and I realized that this man was generating hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. This was enough to remind me that I could succeed in the business. I figured that if he could succeed I could too.
 
I reached out to him several times and told him I would love the opportunity to work with him. He ignored my calls the first few times I called, but I was a hot new recruiter, with a recruiting firm with a good brand, and he had heard about my success. He agreed to meet with me. I met him in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, and we had coffee, and I told him how impressed I was with him, how I could make his phone ring, how I could help him, and what an honor it would be for me to work with him.
 
At the time of this meeting, my business model was already vastly different from all of the recruiters that had been in the business as long as he had been. He was the "old guard" of the most successful recruiters in the business and had risen to be the cream of the crop. When I told him everything, he said something I never forgot: "Let's be clear that ultimately all of this is about money." He seemed uninterested in how my business model was different and was most interested if I could continue to support his old business model of cold calling recruiters around Los Angeles with a team of cold callers.
 
It was a funny business model. He had discovered that he had the most luck hiring aspiring actresses who were happy for the opportunity to have the flexibility to go on auditions when they wanted to, in exchange for cold calling for the equivalent of perhaps $20 an hour. He advertised for women in entertainment-related newspapers that the women he hired needed to be "audition ready". Years later, there was some sort of sexual harassment claim that arose out of these ads from what I remember.
 
When I hired Brian, he told me before accepting the offer that I needed to understand something. He said that he had taken the "Baby Bar Exam" a few decades ago from one of his students that he was teaching in the days of "Siegel's Law Outlines" and been caught and was going to have charges pending against him by the State Bar of California. Instead of being disbarred, he withdrew from the Bar. He said that legal recruiting was the only job he could get after that, so he started doing that—and was shunned by the bar preparation business.
 
He said that after that occurred, he converted to Orthodox Judaism, prayed several times daily, and became a devout Jew. He said he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars he made in placement fees each year to his temple and started living a religious life after that. For the next 20+ years, I largely left him alone. I paid for his office and the women he hired to work for him.
 
Several years ago, his placements started slowing down, and he experienced what so many before him had experienced—his wife left him. It was especially difficult for him because what happened was something he could not understand as a religious man: His wife left him for another woman who had been their friend for years and was a neighbor.
 
I continued to support Brian in his business out of respect for an old business model and out of respect for him and his religion. After all, I too had converted to Judaism and had respect for people who were so committed to something as he was. I also admired his commitment to an old business model. After Ted had died, he was the last one left. A couple of years ago, he left his office and started working at home. He had one cold caller left who had worked for him for 20 years, and she only checked in on him periodically.
 
One day she called me on the phone and was hysterical. She had not heard from him in a few weeks, and he had stopped responding to her emails. She eventually reached out to his family and discovered he had died a few weeks before. Because of his religion, he had to be buried within 24 hours.
 
He was the last of the legal recruiters I knew who continued recruiting into their old age, even into their 80s and until death.
 
When he died, there were no announcements or obituaries in the papers, and no one was aware. Years of serving law firms, his years of being the most successful recruiter in California, and no one knew or cared—even though he was still recruiting into his 80s.
 
I'm assuming that none of the hundreds—if not thousands—of candidates he helped throughout his career, or the law firms he served for decades, were at his funeral either. This is just how it works when recruiters die. For me, he represented devotion to his craft of recruiting, committing to what he knew, committing to honesty, and doing the right thing with his religion. He was one of the few people left from the first generation of recruiters—most of whom left the industry decades ago when their aging business model changed. The stress and competitiveness of being a recruiter had run its course.
 
The last of the legal recruiters had died, and no one in the industry knew. Besides myself and the woman he worked with, no one in law firms or any of his candidates cared.
 
These systems have made it so that the business can essentially operate with no recruiters—just a huge technology, research, and customer services team of 100+ people and a few (traditional) recruiters. However, that invites its issues.
 
Even the customer service agents are getting “poached” away by unsuspecting recruiting firms telling them they should be making “50% commissions” and not being paid like customer service agents.
 
The hardest part of the job was always getting candidates, but more recruiters did not realize this. Not wanting to give up half of their commissions, they would leave our company within a short time.
 
That was even more alienating because I was told that "converts" were never truly part of the religion and that if you were not born into it, you could never understand it.

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About BCG Attorney Search

BCG Attorney Search matches attorneys and law firms with unparalleled expertise and drive, while achieving results. Known globally for its success in locating and placing attorneys in law firms of all sizes, BCG Attorney Search has placed thousands of attorneys in law firms in thousands of different law firms around the country. Unlike other legal placement firms, BCG Attorney Search brings massive resources of over 150 employees to its placement efforts locating positions and opportunities its competitors simply cannot. Every legal recruiter at BCG Attorney Search is a former successful attorney who attended a top law school, worked in top law firms and brought massive drive and commitment to their work. BCG Attorney Search legal recruiters take your legal career seriously and understand attorneys. For more information, please visit www.BCGSearch.com.