First UK Legal Counsel Project: Case Study
Background
Our client was an ASX listed sporting technology business. The company’s continued growth in the UK had led to the need to hire its first UK Legal Counsel providing commercial legal advice and services to the group across Europe, working autonomously and reporting to the general counsel in Australia.
This required a candidate with considerable degree of confidence and commercial acumen, since they would, for the most part, be working as the company’s sole, and first, in-house lawyer in the UK. Potential appointees needed to understand both sides of the supplier-customer relationship, have a big-picture view of what the company is seeking to achieve and to develop strong relationships with non-legally qualified stakeholders and speak in plain English.
The client needed a lawyer already based in the UK who wanted to work on commercial supply contracts in a highly sales-driven environment and confident enough to work on their own largely unsupervised, as opposed to someone who needed frequent mentoring from more senior team members in the same location and/or who had been attracted by the perceived ‘glitz’ of this particular company’s activities.
Challenges
Unusually, for a first UK lawyer recruitment project, the principal challenges centred around two things. Since the salary range was only really appropriate for a relatively junior lawyer, the primary issue revolved around candidates’ perceptions – essentially whether they themselves felt they would be “ready” for what was essentially a sole UK legal counsel role like this at what would be an early stage in their respective careers. The second issue to navigate was the highly compelling proposition presented by opportunities that are in any way connected to the sports and leisure sector, like this was. Roles like this can end up being oversubscribed by inappropriate candidates. Moreover, a high volume of applications does not contribute to success if the proportion of appropriate candidates is low – which is often the case. The resultant admin burden of dealing with everyone appropriately, in order to maintain a positive brand perception and candidate experience is heavy and unproductive.
These issues, combined with a very specific brief from the client, meant that the appropriate candidate pool was never going to be anything other than small.
Solution
Consulting with line management at the outset quickly uncovered the peculiarities of the role and how a UK legal counsel from a regional base outside London would fit into the wider global business. Together, we established that even though the role’s content was predominantly commercial drafting, a candidate with strong corporate law skills would be of great interest to the business, in view of the likely breadth of business knowledge. Whilst the budgetary and PQE parameters remained low, this now made it appropriate for a proactive headhunting exercise to identify candidates from a finite pool, with any recruitment advertising being reserved as a method of last resort, owing to the potential for opening the floodgates to applications from candidates who would not fit the client’s precise brief.
Result
This UK legal counsel role was filled by us within 4 weeks of our initial instruction, supplying a corporate lawyer from a Top 20 commercial law firm in the region who was already seeking a role that would give him the kind of autonomy this opportunity ultimately delivered.
