Early last week I interviewed Eric Sivin, a founder and principal of Sivin Tobin Associates, a legal search and recruiting firm based here in New York.  (And yes, that is their ad that has been running in the right-hand column of my site for a couple of months now—but this piece is not motivated by or part of any commercial considerations whatsoever; it's an effort to better understand the evolution of legal search from the perspective of someone who's been doing it for over 30 years.)

Eric is on the Board of Directors and Treasurer of The National Association of Legal Search Consultants (NALSC), which describes itself as "the only organization representing the legal search profession."   With 173 member firms in the US, Canada, and overseas, NALSC developed and adopted (nearly twenty years ago) a "Code of Ethics", which members must subscribe to.

Eric did not go straight into legal search, but, after Brandeis and NYU Law School, was a commercial litigator for 10 years, starting at Kronish Lieb.  An active intercollegiate debater and national semi-finalist in moot court competition, Eric hoped that being a litigator would allow him to use his skills of rational persuasion in real-life disputes but, as many of us also discovered for ourselves, the life of a litigator in a large New York firm rarely involves actually trying a lot of cases.

When Eric embarked on his career in legal recruiting, the industry was in its infancy.  At the time, there were only seven or eight legal search firms in New York, and very few if any elsewhere; the only work was placing second to fifth-year associates.  Lateral partner hiring was nonexistent.  Even firms that used recruiters for associate hiring did so "holding their noses."

Aside from social customs, also constraining lateral partner recruitment was the relative information vacuum (always an obstacle to markets' clearing efficiently).  The era was pre-The American Lawyer, pre- public information on law firms. 

Eric vividly recalls learning of an opening at a prestigious New York firm for a mid-level litigation associate and calling to ask if he could be of assistance.  When invited to help, he asked about expected salary levels, type of work, and representative clients:  Each and every one of those was "proprietary" and would not be disclosed outside the firm! 

Also, in those pre-Internet days, learning who actually worked at which firm could be like solving Rubik's cube, and the annual publication of Martindale-Hubbell was a red-letter day.  But even Martindale did not reveal all; in many cases, associates were not listed with their firm but only as individual attorneys admitted to practice in New York, in the back of the book.  One would then have to deduce from the office address (say, 919 Third Avenue) what firm they might be with (Skadden).

What a difference a few decades make.

Q.:  When, I asked, did lateral partner recruiting start to become a material part of the business?  A.:  It started to surface in the late '80's, was promptly kiboshed by the recession of the early '90's, and didn't really come into its own until the mid-90's. 

Q.:  Which practice specialties are hot now and which aren't?  A.:  Nothing is hotter than private equity, but securities litigation has been strong for a long time.  Various aspects of corporate law, especially financial services, mutual funds,  '40 Act and hedge fund experts are hot.  Real estate and tax work are just bubbling along, but specialists in tax aspects of real estate investment trusts will always find a home.  M&A is healthy, but not red-hot; and bankruptcy is actually cold, except for firms looking to staff up in the trough in anticipation of the next crest.  And IP, I asked?  IP is very hot; "it's nothing less than the present and future of economic growth," and it's an area where many major firms feel they do not have all the people they need; in other words, the "roll-up" of the IP boutiques by the AmLaw 100 has not completely played itself out.

Q.:  International?  A.:  Very strong; everyone is talking about the far east and China, "even if no one is making any money there."  And the demise of Coudert Brothers had everyone running around to seize opportunities.

Q.:  I assume some firms do lateral recruiting relatively well and others relatively poorly; what are the differences?  A.:  Absolutely!  The key distinctions are:

• Firms poor at lateral recruiting often really don't know exactly what they want or why they want it; they'll take people because their specialty is in fashion or because they come across someone unhappy, but with a nice book of business.  The problem is if there's no strategic fit, which "becomes self-evident during the process as the candidate receives mixed messages."
• Firms also vary in sheer managerial competence; some simply run the search process more effectively than others.  Searches extending out over five or six months or more "are not atypical; inordinate amounts of time go by and people lose interest."
• Some firms don't trust recruiters enough to give them all the information they need to accurately characterize a situation or to keep a candidate informed of where they stand.  A common situation is that of a firm marching almost up to the altar with Candidate 1 only to begin conversations with Candidate 2; and the most popular, if less-than-candid, method of dealing with this is simply to stop returning calls asking where Candidate 1 stands.  "These things happen all the time."
• Conversely, the best searches are when the recruiter and the firm actually work together, collaboratively, to define the position and the opportunity, and to map out what the profile of viable candidates would look like.

Q.:  Post-search, as well, I assume different firms handle the integration better or worse?  A.:  "There are certainly some firms that do this very well.  In the majority of cases, happily, it works out even if the integration is less than ideal—'good enough' does the trick."  Still, in most cases integration is "not done cohesively."  There are many reasons for this; lawyers are busy, they have the attitude that they're "professionals" and disdain "being business-like," there's not a corporate reporting structure or anyone to enforce follow-through on integration.  "Most firms could do a far far better job."

And, considering the amount invested in a search—from what can be an inordinate amount of otherwise-billable hours, to the recruiter's fee, to the reality of their being a three to six-month breaking-in period without any fees being collected—the lack of attention to effective integration is astonishing.

Q.:  Is there activity not on the lawyer side, but on the "C-suite" side, recruiting senior law firm management?  A.:  It's not something Sivin Tobin has chosen to do; we prefer to focus.  But yes, that's an increasingly active area, and firms are getting more sophisticated about the level of professionalism they need in their management ranks.

Q.:  Are dedicated legal search firms such as yours experiencing competition from the Korn-Ferry's and Heidrick & Struggles' of the world?  A.:  Sure, those firms are more interested than ever; let's face it, there's more money at stake.  But Eric doesn't believe they can compete effectively unless they change their fundamental, underlying business model.   They strongly prefer, if they do not simply insist, on doing exclusively retained and not contingency searches.  "You basically cannot do legal search for law firms strictly on a retained basis."  Why?  Because "without the constant contact and flow of information  on who's who, what they're thinking, how they'd respond to a hypothetical scenario, and generally just taking people's temperature," a recruiter isn't in a position to conduct an effective search.  Doing contingent searches ensures that the recruiter is in the marketplace talking to potential future candidates all the time.

Q.:  And the future of recruiting?  A.:  It's getting more and more professional all the time.  "When I started, I think I was the only recruiter who'd really practiced as an attorney," and now that background is extremely common.

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So what is the economic function of legal recruiting?  Recall that I mentioned the difficulty of markets' "clearing" efficiently in an information vacuum.  The converse of that is that the more accurate, timely, comprehensive, and germane is the information at one's fingertips, the more one actually has a fighting chance of deciding wisely. 

Law firms are not in the business of keeping their finger on the pulse of everyone who might potentially join them some day, but when strategy and opportunity intersect, they need a hasty education on who might be receptive to an overture, how their practice has developed, and whether there might be cultural alignment between the firm and the potential lateral.   Good recruiters provide that essential information brokering function. 

I've remarked before that the dynamics of lateral partner mobility becoming a reality "changed everything," and recruiters are indispensable to that marketplace functioning well.  As such, the Eric Sivin's of the world have a vital place in the ecosystem we all inhabit.