There are four reasons in-house legal hiring projects break down.

Do you know where yours is most vulnerable?

Our Legal Recruitment System - LTAR®

Our trademarked, 4-step legal recruitment system is LTAR® stands for Legal Talent Acquisition and Retention.

LTAR® helps businesses hire and retain in-house lawyers of the highest calibre. Companies need in-house lawyers who are not only technically excellent, but who also have the right behavioural fit for the business. Technical competence alone is not enough. Businesses that ignore behavioural fit, often find themselves wasting valuable time and money repeating the process after a failed first attempt. Florit Legal’s comprehensive LTAR® system helps to prevent this.

Here’s how the four steps work…

Explore

Discovery Call

Our legal recruitment system begins with a Discovery Call – an initial consultation aimed at exploring whether our businesses are the right fit for each other. Our objective is simply to understand your particular legal recruitment challenges fully and whether we can work together.

We appreciate that, before you commit to spending money, you need to be confident a recruiter will deliver a return on investment and feel comfortable that they will de-risk the process for you.

This boils down to 3 key questions:

How will they deliver the right behavioural fit in the legal candidates presented?
How will they help the appointee to succeed, and integrate quickly in their first 100 days in a new role?
And what happens if employment is terminated in the first 12 months?

Briefing Meeting

Once you’re comfortable with our answers to those questions, we sign terms, and meet to take a detailed brief from you, which forms the basis of our terms of reference, prior to engaging with potential legal candidates, on your behalf.

We cover four things:

Legal job specification: We gain a full understanding of the background and rationale underpinning the creation of the role. We also explore the full extent of the relevant responsibilities, accountabilities and day to day activities.
Legal candidate pool: Together, we define and agree the legal candidate pool, based on technical legal skills, length of experience, and the extent to which this needs to have come from another in-house legal department, a commercial legal practice, or both.
Business fit: We take steps to understand exactly how a client’s legal department operates, the company culture, structure, decision-making approach, and any particular features associated with the hiring manager’s work style, motivations and competencies.
Behavioural fit: Most importantly, we work with the hiring manager to identify the desired behavioural profile required for success in each job. To do this, we use cutting edge McQuaig® job profiling technology as part of our process. This is one of the major factors that sets our processes apart from of other specialist in-house legal recruiters.

Engage

Terms of Reference

Having explored your legal recruitment needs in depth, we incorporate our findings in a ‘terms of reference’ document for you to sign off. That way, everything’s clear and everyone’s on the same page, before we engage with the legal candidate pool, on your behalf.

Research

Research and engagement is an ongoing process in the niche UK legal market. When we have your mandate, the approach is laser focused on exactly the right pool of candidates from both in-house legal departments and commercial law firms (where we have no conflicts of interest whatsoever). We undertake extensive, legal talent research to identify sources and contacts, and make use of emerging technologies to connect and engage with appropriately qualified solicitors and other legal candidates.

Advertising

Where appropriate, we extend the reach with appropriately placed recruitment advertising, managed by us, and incorporating a client’s branding. This ensures the role gains the attention of candidates right across the UK, or further afield, where there may be already be a desire to relocate. We also offer leverage through social media channels as part of the process.

Outreach

We cast the net wide. Rather than relying on advert responses, we are laser focused on finding the right people for you. We map the relevant legal market thoroughly and approach people directly (sourcing lawyers from your competitors, other in-house teams and, if appropriate, commercial law firms). This way, your shortlist reflects the best candidates available, not just those who happen to be actively making applications. In our experience over the last c30 years, one pattern remains consistent: at any one time, fewer than 1-in-5 lawyers with the credentials clients are looking for are actively seeking a move. So, if you don’t engage with passive candidates, you’re at a huge disadvantage when it comes to the choice and quality of candidates.

Evaluate

This stage of the process marries up our extensive legal recruitment experience and objectivity with cutting-edge, behavioural assessment technology. This enables clients to recruit in-house lawyers with the correct cultural fit for the organisation and right behavioural fit for both the team they are joining and the legal role they will be performing.

The initial screening process is undertaken by an experienced legal recruiter. Our interviews are both biographical and competency based. We aim to uncover the key drivers influencing each candidate’s chosen career path and the goals they are looking to achieve in their next move, and beyond. We then evaluate whether this is likely to be achieved if they were to take up the in-house legal role in question. We explore total compensation, so that you are fully informed, and break this down into each composite part of the package to ensure candidates are on brief. We set appropriate expectations on each side, and explore the prospects and consequences of a counter-offer, from the outset.

Where a client is considering internal candidates for the role concurrently, we recommend putting them through the same behavioural assessment as external candidates, measured against the same job profile. This gives an objective comparison with the market and a fair hearing for colleagues the business already knows.

Our shortlisted candidates are presented to you with a CV, executive summary, and an assessment of how closely each one matches the behavioural profile you created when we took our brief. The behavioural profiling technology we use helps clients evaluate how each candidate will perform the role before you make a hiring decision, instead of relying on trial and error after you appoint them. The valuable foresight this provides is a key element in minimising the risk of a wrong hire – and is one of the elements of our LTAR^® process that sets us apart from other legal recruitment companies.

Ultimately, any recruitment agency on a PSL can send you a selection of CVs, matched to a job description, assuming they have the experience to know what they are doing. But that’s only a partial service with, let’s face it, hardly any effort. The experience of in-house legal and HR teams we have worked with in the past shows you can hire the most technically gifted lawyer within your budget this way, but unless they are the right fit for the business, you risk wasting significant time and money with that recruitment model and having to repeat the process. It’s also why retaining one recruiter exclusively tends to produce better results than sending a role to several agencies at once.

Enhance

When we launched Florit Legal, our mission was (and still is):

to add more value to the recruitment process than any other legal recruiter – via a premium service designed to create enduring relationships.

Whilst one of those relationships is between you and us, the most important one is between you and the appointee. Employee retention is one of our key drivers. Since the costs of attrition and failed recruitment projects are significant, our primary aim is to enhance your ability to retain the key appointees we have helped you to recruit.

By the time one of our legal candidates accepts your offer of employment, step one of our enhancement process is already complete: by using behavioural assessment technology, you’re already confident that the person you have hired has the right fit. And with the right fit, they are less likely to disappoint you, or leave you.

It’s not only the behavioural assessment that allows us to de-risk the legal hiring process for you. Once a role has been filled, our commitment continues beyond the appointee’s start date. Our Employee Retention Programme (ERP), provides further opportunities to de-risk the process for clients, through structured follow-ups and executive coaching, from our panel of independent coaching associates. This is included in the price of our service, which is backed by market leading guarantees* which are above and beyond those we used to provide before we adopted this model. Such is the confidence in our process.

In a 2017 report, the Recruitment & Employment Confederation identified that the cost of a bad hire could be over 3 times the individual’s annual salary. Our process is aimed at eliminating this wasted time and money.

*Terms and Conditions apply

Discuss a Hiring Project

How LTAR® Benefits Your Business

Reduces hiring costs

Promotes the recruitment and retention of in-house lawyers with the right cultural fit for your organisation. Avoids costly attrition.

Reduced time to hire

Dramatically speeds up your time to hire and minimises any disruption to the legal department or the business.

Removes any guesswork

Behavioural assessments help frame interview questions and promote objective, evidence-based decision making.

Competitive Advantage

Goes beyond ‘active’ candidates. Enables better choices by comparing the best in the market, not just the best who applied.

FAQ's

We already have an internal recruitment or HR team, so why would we need your LTAR® system?

Undeniably, many large organisations have excellent talent acquisition capabilities, and internal recruitment works well for major brands that have recruitment ‘kerb appeal’. For those companies, waiting for people to apply to job adverts may be a successful strategy most of the time. However, when it’s not, many internal recruiters have neither the time nor the legal connections to enable them to engage consistently with the passive legal talent pool. When compared with a specialist legal recruiter, they are starting from scratch and immediately at a disadvantage – especially if, like many, they have little or no experience in this very niche field. Many come to view legal recruitment projects as a distraction, taking them away from regular activities – where they add much more value. We fix this, so that your recruiters can make better use of their time.

We already use a legal recruitment agency. So, what makes you different?

Aside from our ability to reach the majority of the UK in-house legal recruitment market with L-TAR^®, we have developed a thorough research, engagement and assessment process which is designed to identify the strongest candidates in any given pool of UK legal talent, accurately benchmark their behavioural assessments against the job requirements, and ensure the right fit. Additionally, the features of our post placement retention programme reduce the risk of attrition and avoid you having to pay twice to replace an in-house lawyer who leaves in the first 12 months.

How wide is your geographical coverage?

Put simply, we cover all types of legal role performed by in-house lawyers in the UK, in any industry sector. We fill legal jobs in London and the Home Counties, The South, and the major commercial centres in the North, Scotland, and the Midlands.

What job titles and positions do you cover?

In general, job titles tend to come from the list below. In deciding which one is best for your particular situation, please see our Complete Guide to In-house Legal Job Titles. Alternatively, please arrange a free Talent Consultation, where we would be happy to advise you further in how to best achieve your goals.

Senior	Other
General Counsel & Company Secretary	Deputy General Counsel
Group General Counsel	Associate General Counsel
Group Company Secretary	Assistant General Counsel
Chief Legal Counsel / Officer	Regional Counsel
Head of Corporate Governance	UK Legal Counsel
Legal Director	Senior Counsel
Head of Legal Services	Legal Counsel
Head of Legal and Compliance	Corporate Counsel
Company Solicitor	In-house Legal Adviser / Counsel

What legal specialisms do you cover?

In around 80% of cases, clients are looking for a corporate lawyer or commercial solicitor to take up an in-house lawyer position. They need a “generalist” and these people are frequently regarded as being the most appropriate to handle the full variety of legal issues facing a business. Most commonly these range from commercial contracts with suppliers and customers, to corporate transactional matters, major legal projects such as acquisitions, joint ventures, IPO’s and company reorganisations, as well as managing the effectiveness of external legal advisers in law firms.

Most Commonly	Less Frequently
Corporate Lawyers (Corporate Finance, M&A, Private Equity, Venture Capital)	Corporate Recovery Lawyers
Commercial Lawyers Technology and Telecoms Lawyers Intellectual Property Lawyers Media, Entertainment and Sport	Commercial Property / Real Estate Lawyers Commercial Litigation Lawyers Employment Lawyers Pensions and Employee Benefits Lawyers Planning and Environmental Lawyers
Capital Projects Lawyers Construction and Engineering Lawyers Project Finance Lawyers
Energy Lawyers Renewable Energy Lawyers Oil & Gas Lawyers
Financial Services Lawyers Retail Banking and Insurance lawyers (eg Consumer credit, FCA, MCOB, ICOB etc) Commercial Banking Lawyers (asset finance, securitisation, capital markets)
Regulatory Lawyers Company Secretaries and Corporate Governance specialists Data Protection Lawyers (GDPR) Anti-bribery specialists Sector specific legal and regulatory roles (eg Telecoms, Energy, Water, Sport etc).

Since your LTAR® system involves headhunting UK in-house lawyers, don't you ever have conflicts of interest?

Hardly ever really.

The first reason for this is that Florit Legal is ‘sector agnostic’ – ie we don’t limit ourselves to specialising in any particular vertical market or industry sector. This is intentional as it gives us a relatively free rein as to who we are able to approach on your behalf. The second reason is that we never seek recruitment mandates from law firms or public bodies and we are free to headhunt anyone you want us to from those types of organisation.

The only time we might get a conflict of interest is if we have previously acted for one of your competitors and you have identified that person as someone you might like us to engage with. If that’s the case we would point this out to you at the outset. The same would be true if the situation were reversed. Your company would be ‘off limits’ in a beneficial way as outlined below.

Your company is ‘off limits’: As soon as you retain Florit Legal exclusively to recruit an in-house lawyer for you, your business becomes ‘off-limits’ in two ways. Firstly, any of your existing in-house lawyers are immediately placed ‘off limits’ to ensure they are not contacted by any of our consultants or researchers on other recruitment projects. Secondly, once we have placed a candidate with you, that individual stays off limits, whilst there, ‘for life’ (ie, we will never headhunt people that we have placed with you). These factors mean we can never offer 100% market coverage. Professionally and ethically-speaking, no legal recruiter ever can. However, we can offer the widest possible access to the legal market this way and by never acting for law firms.
Law firms and public bodies are never ‘off limits’: There are now around 179,000 practising solicitors in England and Wales, with approximately 26% (over 46,000) working in-house and more than 95,000 in private practice.* Since we never act for law firms, these organisations represent an important source of high quality candidates for our corporate clients.

By remaining focused on in-house legal recruitment exclusively, we minimise potential conflicts of interest. And by promoting your opportunity and organisation through our blog, social media channels and newsletters, we extend our reach beyond the many lawyers we already know.

In the very unlikely event of a conflict that prevents us from headhunting someone from a company you might have on your list of targets, we will make you aware of it from the outset.

*Sources: Solicitors Regulation Authority, August 2026; Law Society of England and Wales, December 2025.

There are four reasons in-house legal hiring projects break down.

Do you know where yours is most vulnerable?

Our Legal Recruitment System - LTAR®