In-house Commercial IP Lawyer Recruitment Project
Background
Our client is one of the UK’s largest providers of creative and development services to the video games and entertainment industries. Together, the award-winning group delivers end-to-end visual and development solutions to the video games industry and beyond, from visual concept design and pre-production through to development, user-interface design, and post-release support.
The company’s General Counsel had developed a business case to hire an IP Lawyer to assist with day to day management of a portfolio of corporate, commercial and intellectual property legal matters.
Key requirements included:
- At least 1 year PQE following on from a top commercial law firm training;
- Experience in commercial contracts centred on the technology industry and intellectual property rights; and/or
- Experience of corporate M&A work focused on the technology industry and an ability and desire to undertake a wider range of legal work including IP matters, with the assistance of external counsel.
- Proximity to Sheffield, Yorkshire.
Challenge
Location was the main hurdle to navigate.
As is often the case with in-house legal roles outside London, the principal challenge is trying to balance specific requirements of a job description with the availability of relevant candidates in the local market. Here, given that there were less than a handful of commercial law firms with any significant commercial IP law practice, there was only a small number of junior candidates who were likely to have the ideal set of skills.
In order to arrive at a shortlist giving sufficient candidate choices, flexibility is then sometimes required on a client’s part on such things as location, budget or PQE to bring a sensible number of candidates into consideration. Since, there could really only be one location in which the GC’s first legal hire would be able to work, and the budget was capped, any flexibility had to relate to the client’s willingness to consider transferrable skills. Fortunately, they were able to offer some flexibility in this regard provided the right set of behavioural attributes were present in the candidate.
Solution
The result with this client is a classic example of behavioural attributes being key to recruitment decision-making – especially at a relatively junior level.
Once the client had offered some flexibility on the precise nature of a candidate’s experience to date, we were able to map the local market for junior lawyers across a broad range of potentially suitable practice areas who were interested in taking on a broad in-house legal role with a significant IP law slant – not exclusively commercial IP lawyers. This flexibility gave rise to a healthy initial shortlist of 10 candidates for initial consideration, headhunted from local law firms and in-house legal teams.
Through this process we were able to identify an outstanding corporate lawyer who had experienced a wide range of transactions source from multiple sectors, including tech.
This is a process that has now worked reliably and successfully on 3 occasions for the same client, who has twice expressed some frustration at not being able to hire more than one lawyer from the shortlist we have presented.
