The Professionals - Recruitment and Retention in the Law

The fight is on for legal talent. However, the battles are not being won by law firms that are following the traditional techniques, but by those that are choosing the path of corporate recruitment. Sarah David, associate director of TMP QD Legal, discusses the very real threats to law firms wishing to expand their practices by hiring new legal talent. No longer is it a question of which law firm can provide the most fulfiling and lucrative opportunities...but which industry.

I was out for lunch recently with the managing partner of a successful London office of a US firm. He was commenting on a competitor spending significant amounts of money on recruitment/profile advertising. He was appalled by this: "Are we not a profession?". This is the crux of the incredibly uncomfortable place that most firms find themselves in at the moment. Being proactive, pushy, facing down the numbers issues - this is not what law firms have traditionally been about. There is no doubt, however, that those acting most like corporates are winning the very corporate battle to both recruit and retain legal staff.

At the heart of the issue of recruitment lies the question of cost - actual cost; opportunity cost; emotional cost. To a profession that prides itself on its logic, order and process, the emotions of recruitment and retention go against the grain of what lawyers have to produce for their clients every day. This has been compounded more recently by the fact that money has become the biggest issue for negotiation in both retention and recruitment, and lawyers are being pushed outside their comfort zones (in my dealings with candidates and law clients, both sides are often surprisingly uncomfortable discussing remuneration).

In contrast to this, many lawyers, particularly those at the NQ-4 year level, are actively pushing themselves outside their comfort zones - they are leaving the law altogether. The last five years have seen more opportunities outside the profession opening up to the brightest young things (as bankers, management consultants and, yes, recruitment consultants). The law is certainly not universally perceived to be the prestigious or lucrative career it once was.

Speaking to a number of people involved in graduate recruitment, there is a strong feeling that the very best people no longer automatically consider applying for training contracts with law firms. Speaking to HR professionals and friends in law firms, partnership is no longer seen as the ultimate goal. Fifteen years ago, would anybody have predicted the contraction, consolidation and general demoralisation that has swept the Bar in the past couple of years? Are law firms ready to face a similar fate or are they going to look up and look out to stem the flow of highly intelligent, commercial people who are leaving the law, or perhaps more worryingly not even considering it as a career option to start with.

As a recruitment professional, I am not naïve as to why the recruitment/retention of lawyers is so emotive. It is a fact of life that some partners are just not interested in recruitment or retention, and are totally unaware of the cost to the business (writing off time when other lawyers have to bring themselves up to speed on files; recruiters' fees; emotional cost - someone leaving the team sets others thinking about their futures; interview time for replacements etc. etc.). What is more, this is not a generational issue as I have certainly met a number of younger partners who are totally disinterested in recruitment. These tend to be the partners who feel that the future partners will come from their own trainees (and so don't see the point in investing in recruitment) and who don't appreciate the attrition rate in the new generation (and so don't have any idea about retention). You are never going to change these partners' minds. But the firms that are winning the recruitment/retention war are those who have got together a group of partners who want to win this battle. Again, these firms have structured a suitable reward system: clearly the partnership pressures to fee earn don't sit well with the 'non-chargeable' time that this battle demands.

Generation X: it's all now, now, now

The market over the last three years has been incredibly favourable to the candidates. This is still very much the case. I would love to say that the majority of my candidates interview broadly and widely, collating offers and then making a decision on the firm that best suits them, spending months in the process. They don't. They are busy people, they are tired, and they want a change. They tend to go very much on gut reaction and market gossip. Once they get their first offer, they start easing up on interviewing, and usually once they are holding two offers, any future first interviews are cancelled. Furthermore, unfortunately, very few candidates appreciate how different law firms can be (which is a reason why so many firms spend significant sums of money on advertising in the legal trade press to promote a few key messages that they want candidates to associate with their firm). As a sweeping generalisation, once they have a couple of offers, candidates tend to take the offer that offers them a good increase on their current salary (it doesn't necessarily have to be the highest offer) with a good work flow and a tolerable attrition rate among the assistants.

When we are recruiting consultants to come and work with us, the interview process is painfully long. We are finding it harder and harder to encourage the more junior candidates through this process, as they are so used to getting everything that they want in such a short period of time. We obviously feel very strongly that it is important to keep it a lengthy process because walking away from a profession is such a huge issue. What's more, we are in the perfect position for discovering the ideal job to work in at a law firm. I am able to experience first hand law firms from Joe Bloggs & Co all the way through to Clifford Chance and everything in between. I knew very much that I did not want to be a lawyer, but there have probably been two or three occasions where I have had second thoughts, coming across firms that I certainly never ever knew existed when I worked in a magic circle firm. But the point is, that candidates these days will not spend the time to find the perfect job. This is why advertising has become such a huge weapon. There is no doubt that style can beat substance, that the younger generation are incredibly influenced by how something is packaged to them, as much as how it actually is in reality.

It is all very well partners maintaining that, as a profession, we shouldn't act like the corporates, but this is no good if all the younger lawyers coming into the profession are thinking like corporate people and have been exposed to advertising and marketing promoting this ethos from such a young age. Does Nike need to advertise? Does McDonalds need to advertise? Does Coca Cola need to advertise? They are possibly the three leading global brand names, and have been so for the last five, ten years. Yet they continue to spend more money, I would guess, than nearly every other corporate in the world. Law firms have got to recognise that lawyers, just because they are professionals, are not immune to this.

Get the best

What is more, how things are presented to them and how the process is pitched is very important to candidates. They don't make any allowances for the fact that they operate within a professional organisation and not a corporate. They expect prompt responses to their CV, they expect interviews to be conducted in an informed way. They expect slick literature. No matter that those interviewing them are the people bringing in and transacting the business (which in corporates just wouldn't be the case). The key movers in getting the hottest candidates are:

Response to the CV within the same week (i.e. a response to the CV by Friday whenever the CV was sent that week).
Interviews with well-informed partners who both ask questions (candidates like to feel that they have achieved something) and answer them.
The second interview should be confirmed at the first and should be set up very quickly; it needs also to cover different issues from the first interview (and the interviewers should appear to have had feedback from the first interview, too).
Drinks with assistants and then an offer made at the same time.
When offer is made, all interviewing partners and assistants informed and given contact details on candidate, to call and congratulate/encourage etc.

How can you get the best value for money in the recruitment and retention war? Firstly, use agencies. And I don't mean instructing them, I mean spending time to build up relationships and then push those people. Some of my most demanding clients are also the ones that tend to give me the most information, allow me the most access to partners, and with whom, as a result, I end up placing the highest numbers of lawyers.

We are the largest legal recruiter and place more lawyers than any other agency. The law firms that are most successful at both retaining and recruiting lawyers are the ones that have made that significant cost investment into the recruitment and retention process. They tend to have a core recruitment and retention team of partners and HR professionals. No matter the size of firm, this could be one of your best investments. I know that a number of the more seasoned partners/HR professionals say that the market won't go on like this forever and that when the recession comes, you won't need agencies or in house recruitment professionals.

However, the landscape has totally changed over the last five years; lawyers no longer think of themselves anymore as allied to one firm for life. They think of themselves as individuals who constantly need to ensure that they are in the best place to progress their career. In the last recession, we actually grew our business.

Give the fact that we are moving ever towards American style lawyering where corporates instruct the individuals, the people they want to work with, rather than instructing the name of a firm, firms are faced with the challenge to build an employer brand - to create an environment where individuals flourish, not one where drones work just for the good of the name of the firm. It seems difficult to conceive that partners have time to check on the personal and social welfare of their employees; but the chances of retaining your employees if somebody is not keeping an eye on these issues are strongly diminished in a market where candidates are demanding that approach. Again, there are a number of firms who have tackled this issue by recruiting dedicated recruitment and retention professionals to the organisation with great success.

How to get ahead

Over 50% of people coming into the profession are women. A large percentage of women don't continue working in the profession due to family commitments and their seeming incompatibility with law firm culture. I am fortunate to know many incredibly bright, intelligent women who would dearly love to work on a part-time fee-earning basis. It is argued that part-time fee-earning brings (at least short-term) difficulties with it; it is much easier to imagine clients adjusting to job sharing (not least because many clients offer that to their own employees). The firms that really make an effort to develop a sensible job share programme will surely be the winners over the next five years, recession or otherwise, just given the number of women that work in the profession.

The number of lawyers moving here from Australia and New Zealand continues unabated and as the world becomes more global it is difficult to imagine that this will stop. However, what about the large number of lawyers who train in India, South America, across Europe? As one of the leading financial centres in the world, it is surprising that law firms have not tackled the recruitment crisis on a more global basis. Again, firms that take the cream of the crop out of these places will be one step ahead of those who are only just coming around to the idea that Antipodeans can undertake corporate work in the UK. Like anything, investing in recruiting just seems to be eating more into that precious time that you already don't have enough of. The firms that have recognised that recruitment and retention are the biggest threats to future success, are the firms that are winning the battle for the hottest candidates today.

Sarah David is associate director at TMP QD Legal. Email: sdavid@tmpw.co.uk. Before moving into legal recruitment, Sarah worked as a lawyer at Slaughter and May.