Given that a law firm's only meaningful asset is its people, I have long been mystified at the prevalence of "contingency" vs. "retained" recruiting.  At last someone agrees with me that this talent-seeking model is perverse.  Consider:

• by definition, contingency recruiters operate on the principle of "throw it all up against the wall and see what sticks;"
• their incentives to be first-in-the-door with a candidate, combined with zero effective braking system in place, means their tendency is to swamp firms with good, bad, and indifferent candidates;
• even worse is that the contingency recruiters' candidate pool is heavily, if not exclusively, skewed to those lawyers who are willing to admit they're dissatisfied where they are—and includes none of the stars whose firms presumably are rewarding them for staying put; and lastly is that
• the contingency recruiter not only has no loyalty to any given candidate, he/she has none to any given firm.  They operate oblivious (in practice, if not in the abstract) to firms' varying cultures, practice expertise, and "brands."

There's a reason that "retained" executive-search is the rule outside the legal marketplace, if a corporation is seeking a manager for a position that could actually make a difference.   But isn't every single lawyer in a firm supposed to make a difference?