Executive search for law firms
Past a certain size, a firm stops being a partnership that needs administration and becomes an enterprise that needs operators. These are the five seats that decide whether it scales, along with what each one owns and why each is harder to fill than the equivalent job in a corporation.
Why these seats exist now and did not thirty years ago.
The modern firm split its partnership in two. Equity and non-equity. Rainmakers and service partners. Finders, who bring the clients in; minders, who keep them; grinders, who do the work. Profits per equity partner became the number the market watches, and the market, as our founder puts it, is not emotional. It decided that rainmakers are more valuable than service partners, and it rewards firms accordingly.
A business with that structure cannot be run from a committee that meets on Thursdays. It needs people whose whole job is the business, so the partners can spend theirs on the practice. That is what these seats are, and it is why the wrong hire into one of them is felt across the whole partnership.
Have a seat to fill
Know the role, or still shaping it?
Often the seat needs defining before it can be filled, and that argument is worth having first.
A partnership is not a company, and the hire has to know it.
A corporate executive search assumes a chain of command. A law firm does not have one. That single difference decides who succeeds in the seat, and it is why a strong corporate resume is a weak predictor here.
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Influence instead of authority
The people whose behavior has to change are owners, not reports. The candidates who thrive have led without a mandate before and can tell you exactly how they did it.
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Fluency in the economics
Realization, leverage, origination credit, and the two-tier partnership are the language of the room. An executive who cannot speak it will be managed around inside a year.
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Tolerance for consensus
Decisions move at the speed of a partnership. The right hire finds that workable rather than maddening, and knows which battles are worth a committee.
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A mandate that is real
Before we search, we press on what the seat can actually decide. The failure we see most often is a role never given the authority its title implied. We would rather have that argument with you now than watch the hire lose it later.
Start here
Tell us what needs running better.
We will tell you what that seat looks like in the market, what it costs, and whether the mandate you have in mind will attract the person you want.
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