The specialist recruitment of lawyers has been at the heart of the business of Piper Pritchard since its inception. It is worth noting that until the late 1980’s, the active search for lateral recruits from another law firm barely existed. This unspoken rule was broken by the recruitment of three high profile partners by one city law firm. Although it’s general acceptance took a few years to become an accepted paradigm for a firms’ development, from the early 90’s law firms began to draw up strategies for growth based on this principal. Piper Pritchard was one of the first firms to specialise in this area of recruitment. We now provide a 360 degree service for the recruitment of lawyers beyond trainee stage.
Private Practice
Piper Pritchard is one of the leading and longest standing suppliers of
bespoke search services to law firms. Initially, this was confined to the
identification, approach and recruitment of partners and their teams. We act
for some of the worlds leading law firms, in the UK and increasingly across
Europe. We provide strategic advice in the form of sector reports and
analysis, market surveys and competitor analysis. This, crucially, allows
our clients to base their decision making on objective data, rather than
subjective opinion and gossip. We then work with clients to develop a plan
of action to address their needs.
Inevitably, given our clients core strengths, we have extensive knowledge of
the mainstream corporate, M&A, banking and structured finance markets.
However, over the years we have been successfully involved in searches in
almost all of the mainstream practice areas of London firms.
Whilst, partner search remains one of the core activities of the firm, in
the last few years and led exclusively by client demand, Piper Pritchard has
extended this service to cover the lateral recruitment of associate and
assistant solicitors. Clients began to realise that although they were able
to differentiate in terms of deal size and complexity, salary and benefits,
they were often unable to attract the stars from other firms. We were asked
to extend our partner search approach to this strategic need. We now have a
well developed process driven team, exclusively focused on associate
search.
In House
As a logical extension of its services to law firms, Piper Pritchard provides a similar, bespoke search service to any and all commercial entities that require the recruitment of senior, specialist lawyers.
The development of in house legal capacity has changed radically over the last 20 years. Before this, the usual model for an in house counsel was to cover basic company secretarial, regulatory, employment, pension and property issues. More complex M&A, specialist litigation, tax and structured finance issues were inevitably given to external counsel. Now, and following the model first developed within the US, this has reversed and the complex, structured, "value-added" legal services are now undertaken in house and the minor services given to external counsel.
Accordingly, Piper Pritchard’s search process and database of lawyers has proved of great benefit to a broad spectrum of clients from global investment banking institutions to corporate entities.
