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?
