Attorney Placement Case Studies

Labor & Employment continues to be a very hot practice area throughout California. Even small-firm candidates with somewhat "clunky" backgrounds but with strong and substantive defense-side Labor & Employment experience may have success moving up to a midsized or larger firm. READ MORE >

Every candidate placement can teach us something about the market and about the marketability of similarly-situated candidates. In the case of the candidate that I just placed, I learned that Labor & Employment continues to be a very hot practice area throughout California, and even senior Labor & Employment attorneys are placeable (even though, for example, senior General Litigators are very hard to place). I also learned that it is important for the Recruiter and for the candidate not to give up, and for the Recruiter to continue to apply the candidate to firms and new opportunities, even to the same firm multiple times if the new opening that pops up is a closer fit to the candidate's practice area, experience and specialty than the original opening that the candidate was applied for. READ MORE >

The latest candidate that I placed, a junior general litigator based out of Ontario, CA (a small market to the east of Los Angeles), is a great example of the fact that persistence, both on the part of the Recruiter and on the part of the candidate, can really pay off when it comes to a lateral firm search. READ MORE >

Every candidate is different, and every candidate placement can teach us something about the marketability of certain candidates and / or what a candidate can do in order to maximize his or her chances of getting a great offer. READ MORE >

I recently placed a mid-level litigator at a national, eleven-office firm. This doesn't sound like anything to write home about, but it is actually quite difficult to place general litigators at large national firms. There is an abundance of litigators - in fact, I've heard a statistic that 90% of attorneys are litigators and 10% are corporate attorneys. General litigators (at the higher end of the spectrum, general commercial litigators, but at the lower end, PI attorneys, plaintiff's side Labor & Employment attorneys, etc.) are the most common types of litigators, so you can imagine that the competition is stiff for these attorneys when it comes to the lateral firm market, especially when these attorneys are attempting to lateral between or to large national firms. READ MORE >

Recent law school graduates who are coming off of a clerkship can be a tough proposition for a Legal Recruiter. It is a lot easier for us to place candidates who left their firm, did a clerkship and are now looking to go back to a firm, than a candidate who went straight to a clerkship after law school and are now looking to land at their first firm. Another element of difficulty is added when the candidate is coming off of a Bankruptcy clerkship. Ideally, these candidates would land in a Bankruptcy position or at a Bankruptcy boutique firm, but these positions and firms are very few and far between, especially in this stronger economy (however, Bankruptcy will probably see a resurgence if the economy experiences a slowdown or recession). READ MORE >

I very recently placed an LLM candidate at a top Am Law 100 firm in Silicon Valley. I really didn't think that I would be able to place her. It is very, very hard to place LLM candidates. This candidate had reached out to me on LinkedIn, asking for help with her search. I found her profile in my company's database from a previous contact with my company, and saw that she had been rejected as a candidate that we didn't think that we could work with or place. I was, as a result, initially very on the fence about working with her. I hadn't previously had success with LLM candidates, and she currently worked at the Silicon Valley office of a Chinese law firm (a law firm that probably would be unrecognizable to most firms). However, she had several things going for her: 1) she is Chinese and speaks Mandarin fluently, 2) she was at one of the best Chinese law firms (and we could say so in her cover letter), 3) she is an American citizen and therefore has her green card, 4) she has sophisticated and high-level General Corporate and cross-border M&A /Venture Capital experience and 5) perhaps most importantly, she had previously worked at a top American Am Law 100 firm in Shanghai for a couple of years before lateraling to her current firm (she had wanted to move to the Bay Area to be with her American husband, but wasn't able to land at an American law firm at that time). I think that what really saved this candidate was that she speaks fluent Mandarin, regularly works in Mandarin and with Chinese clients, and that she worked at a top American Am Law 100 firm in the past. If she had only had experience at the Chinese law firm, I think that her search would have been a lot more difficult. READ MORE >

I recently worked with a candidate who was different from any other candidate that I had previously worked with. To her credit, she had great academic credentials – she graduated from a top five law school and a solid undergraduate school with top grades from the latter. However, she was currently in a policy fellowship at the headquarters of a renowned tech company in Washington, DC, had no law firm experience, either post-graduation or during her law school summers, and her resume was heavily public-interest focused (which can raise a red flag in law firms' minds about a candidate's commitment to going to a firm and staying there long-term). During her 2L summer, she did serve as a Legal Intern at a renowned government agency, and obtained some antitrust-related legal research and writing experience there, but otherwise her experience was mostly in international human rights and international justice. READ MORE >

I first met this candidate in February 2019, when she reached out to us about a litigation opening we had posted on the BCG website. This candidate was very junior, law school class of 2018, and had attended a regional law school. She had, however, excelled in law school, graduating ranked second in her class and serving on the executive board of her school's law review. After reviewing her resume, I reached out to the candidate via text message and set up an introductory phone call for the next day. READ MORE >

Every candidate placement teaches me something and adds valuable data to my Recruiter knowledge bank. Occasionally, a candidate placement will challenge preconceived notions that I've held about certain types of candidates and whether or not they are marketable. In the case of the candidate that I just placed, the idea that was challenged was that unemployed candidates are by and large unmarketable, and that once you've left Big Law, you're never going back. READ MORE >

The candidate that I just placed, a Class of 2016 Associate at a Big Law firm in Portland, taught me a couple of valuable lessons: 1) Candidates come to you at all different points of their lateral firm searches. Some are ready to hit the ground running and apply broadly, others are interested to see what's on the market, but perhaps only want to submit a couple of applications or a couple of feelers, and still others are not ready to get their search started quite yet, but want to establish a relationship with a Recruiter for when they are ready to hit the ground running. READ MORE >

The lateral hiring process can be very quick or it can take several months to a year or more. In the case of this candidate, the process was very, very quick! Before I placed this candidate, the quickest that I had experienced was about two weeks. In the case of this candidate, the process took only a week to slightly less than a week - six days! READ MORE >

Making a lateral move as an experienced attorney without a book of business is possible, if you have specialized experience in a busy practice area. READ MORE >

This placement was a very interesting one. I'd been working with a junior to mid-level Labor & Employment candidate since the end of July. She was never very responsive to me, but did approve fairly large batches of firms in July, August, and September. She didn't want to send me her transcript (apparently her grades were not good) and did not tell me when she left her firm in August. I realized on my own that she had left her firm sometime after August, as she was no longer on her firm's website. However, at the end of November, she became much more responsive. I started approaching her with several Labor & Employment opportunities, both Plaintiff's Side and Defense, and it turned out that the firm that she had accepted on her own in August was terrible and she wanted to leave as soon as possible. READ MORE >

We are finding that 2016 law school graduates are just starting to be marketable now. I have been working with a 2016 graduate since the end of October, and have only very recently placed him. He is currently at a very small firm in Los Angeles (practically a solo practitioner's office), and was looking to make an upward move in his career to a bigger firm. We did get him an interview almost immediately after submitting him in October, but the firm's feedback was that while they really liked him, his experience was too limited and for too short of a period of time. READ MORE >