Financial Services Lawyer Recruitment Project: First In-house Lawyer Case Study
Background
Prior to Florit Legal’s involvement, the client, a leading UK investment management business, had been looking to recruit a financial services lawyer as their Legal Counsel for a period of nearly 9 months via a legal recruitment generalist, but without success.
A period of sustained organic growth had led the company to engage in its first legal counsel recruitment project in the UK. Somewhat unusually for a financial services lawyer position this role was to be based outside London. In common with a number of first in-house legal counsel appointments, the role would be reporting to the Finance Director.
Owing to the client’s frustration with the time things had taken without tangible results, the FD sought the advice of a mutual contact at a leading UK law firm. He recommended Florit Legal owing to our in-house legal recruitment specialism and the nature and extent of our multi-sector network of in-house lawyers, and financial services solicitors in law firms across the UK.
Challenge
Understandably, owing to the company’s poor experience with the other recruiter, the FD’s confidence in achieving a result with what seemed to him to be a smaller recruitment business was low. However, encouraged by a strong recommendation from the client’s trusted external lawyers, we were appointed exclusively to take over the process.
Solution
A meeting with key stakeholders at board level not only allowed us to take a comprehensive brief, but also allowed us to restore the director’s confidence in the market for legal candidates in the north of England.
Since the remoter parts of the country are sometimes a little more challenging to recruit into when compared with in-house legal functions in city centres such as Leeds or Manchester, we called upon our established network of lawyers in the north for recommendations, referrals and self-selection.
The full brief we took, on key technical and personality requirements, enabled us to table a manageable number of carefully chosen financial services lawyer CVs. An appointment was successfully made after just one round of interviews – the appointee from a top 20 UK law firm background in financial services regulatory advice but also commercial contract negotiation – both of which were key requirements.
