The founder
Richard Brock spent twenty years watching firms lose laterals they should have landed.
Almost always for fixable reasons. A committee that met monthly. An offer that got workshopped while another firm answered in three days. A partner nobody had thought to ask why she would move at all. He had built two attorney recruiting companies before this one, long enough to see that the problem was rarely the candidate and rarely the firm. It was the way the work was being done, and he had been doing it that way too.
So he stopped. A lawyer by training, from Washington and Lee and then the University of Alabama School of Law, and licensed to this day, he built OnBoard around the standard a law firm applies to its own client work.
The partner worth hiring is the one who wants to be there, and that starts with a firm that can say why.
He set the framework down in 2024, in Win the Talent Game. It is the clearest account of how he thinks about this work. He also hires and mentors the people who run the searches he does not.
- RoleFounder and chief executive
- AuthorWin the Talent Game, 2024
- ReadUniversity of Alabama School of Law
Why we work this way
We started as a traditional recruiting firm, and stopped.
The industry standard way of operating was not in the best interests of the law firms we worked for, and once that was obvious it was difficult to keep doing it. A recruiter whose interest begins and ends with someone being hired has a different interest from the firm doing the hiring, and the gap between the two is where most of the damage in this industry happens.
So we looked at how our clients build their own businesses. A firm sells professional services designed around what the client actually needs, and puts its judgment on the line when it gives advice. There was no good reason a recruiter should work any other way.
What changed
Retained, selective, and close to every search.
What we left behind
- The same candidate sent to five firms at once.
- Volume rewarded ahead of fit.
- A firm’s name in play across the market without its say.
- Searches that quietly do not happen, and nobody asking why.
How we work now
- Retained on the search, and selective about the ones we take on.
- Willing to say a candidate does not clear, and to say it early.
- Confidential from the first word, on both sides of the table.
- The search owned from the first conversation to the close.
How we think about it
What tends to change the shape of a search.
The book matters less as a credential than as a working method, and three ideas in it do more than any others to change what a search looks like.
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01
Why should a lateral move to your firm?
A surprising number of firms cannot answer it in a sentence. If leadership cannot, a good partner will not invent an answer on the firm’s behalf.
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02
What do you actually need?
The common request is a partner with a full self-sustaining book who will also absorb overflow work. There are only so many hours in a day.
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03
Remember that you are selling too.
The candidate experience runs from how the receptionist answers the phone to how the compensation conversation is handled. Recruiting is selling, whether or not the word is comfortable.
The team
You will be dealing with the people who do the work.
The firm is small on purpose, so the person you speak to is close to the search. Between them the team covers partner-level search, group hires and combinations, in-house placements, research, and the market intelligence the rest of it depends on.
Richard Brock
Founder and chief executive
Matt Bragiel
Senior director
Stacy Ball
Legal search consultant
Kimberly Daniel
Legal search consultant
Jeamer Nichols
Legal search consultant
DeLene Stutts
Legal search consultant
Dave Williams
Legal search consultant
Mary T. Miller
Research consultant
Mandy Wideman
Research and marketing
Greg Boggs
Director of growth
Where we work
The next market is wherever the mandate goes.
We run retained partner-level searches in cities across the country, from Alaska to South Florida and from Hawaii to New England. A market joins the list when a client sends us there, not because it looked good on a map.
Reach is the easy half. Knowing which partners in a given city are genuinely movable, and why, is what decides a search, and that is earned one search at a time.
Where we stand
Selective on purpose, and national by necessity.
Growth is strategic here for the same reason we tell clients it should be strategic there. We are deliberate about how many engagements we take on, so that each one gets the attention it needs, and we recruit across the country because the partner a firm wants is rarely in the same city as the firm that wants them.
Tell us what you are trying to build.
One conversation is usually enough to know what the search really is, and what it will take to land the partner you want.
Member of the National Association of Legal Search Consultants.