Appointing an In-house Procurement Lawyer Team
Background
Our client, a major financial services institution, commenced a volume legal recruitment project focused on hiring lawyers, at a lower cost base, outside London. In the years that followed, in so far as the client’s global procurement lawyer function was concerned the main thrust of their legal recruitment would be focused on the UK regions, outside London.
The first phase was to fill 16 procurement lawyer roles. With such a large scale recruitment project, Florit Legal’s legacy business, lead by both the Florit Legal directors, was appointed as part of a panel of 3 legal recruitment suppliers based in Leeds and London.
The aim was to recruit an entire in-house legal team of commercial contracts lawyers from other in-house legal functions or local law firms. The new legal team would then work on the entire range of strategically important, high value commercial contracts across a number of procurement categories covering everything from corporate real estate to technology, human capital, operations, professional services, marketing and advertising.
Challenges
Initially, the procurement lawyers being sought were to be based in an existing Sheffield office location. This presented 2 principal challenges for us to overcome. Firstly, the scale of the client’s recruitment requirement, was not easily suited to Sheffield’s relatively small legal ‘talent pool’, when compared with the larger commercial legal centres of Leeds and Manchester. Secondly, the then market availability of commercial contracts lawyers specialising in procurement was low.
A volume in-house legal team recruitment project of this scale requires a good degree of flexibility from an employer, not only regarding a candidate’s technical legal background but also where they can be based. Therefore, following our engagement, we advised the client to shift its focus to Leeds as the principal location. Furthermore, after some further dialogue, the client’s opportunities were extended to lawyers with a range of technical backgrounds, with transferrable skills, and not just procurement lawyers.
Solution
Understanding the client’s needs: Panel recruiters worked to a ‘template’ job description for each seniority grade. Whilst the common subject matter of each role was global procurement contracts, the precise detail of each role and how it fitted within the seven procurement categories was delivered in group briefings with line managers and ‘master vendor’ representatives. It was then for us to put each individual legal opportunity into its relevant context for each interested candidate we engaged with. This required a very clear understanding of what technical legal backgrounds would suit each role.
Legal recruitment strategies: Volume recruitment projects are relatively rare for in-house legal functions. Such assignments require a systematic approach – the objective being to make contact with a large number of candidates and the widest possible cross-section of technical legal skills and seniority (PQE) within short period of time. Therefore, our consultants used multiple candidate sourcing strategies concurrently, to engage with the largest possible legal candidate base. This produced a very large number of interested candidates from the Yorkshire legal community, as well as lawyers looking to relocate to Yorkshire from London and elsewhere in the UK.
Looking beyond technical legal skills: Owing to the client’s flexibility on the range of different legal skills they were happy to consider on their shortlist, the roles effectively represented a rare opportunity for some lawyers to change direction, and to become a commercial contracts lawyer. This was very compelling for those candidates who had been seeking an in-house legal role for a considerable time but without success simply because other companies had perceived them as lacking the right experience. Therefore, our ability to identify candidates with the right qualities and personal attributes was critical, since (with a few exceptions) calibre was of greater importance than a candidate’s current legal specialism.
Result
Over a 5 year period our consultants placed 23 lawyers into what was effectively a new in-house procurement legal team. In addition to placing lawyers who already had procurement and/or more general commercial contracts experience, the project allowed us to offer in-house legal careers to lawyers who had, until this point, been less well catered to by the legal recruitment market, owing to them having specialised in areas like commercial lending, corporate finance, construction projects, real estate, compliance, pensions and employment law.
Features
- Volume legal recruitment: a large-scale multi-disciplinary hiring project to create a new in-house legal team from scratch.
- Geographical issues: a limited the legal talent pool.
- Legal recruitment strategy: multi-faceted, concurrent, volume legal recruitment methods.
- Master vendor: we were instructed us as part of a panel of legal recruitment suppliers.
- Varied appointees: 23 in-house lawyers placed in-house from a wide range of technical backgrounds.
- Location: Leeds, Sheffield and London.
