Who did I hire?

Imagine hiring a talented recruit, only to have someone else show up on day one. That would never happen in your company, yet it happens all the time when clients hire a firm instead of the lawyers who will actually do the work. Most clients focus on hiring a firm when what really matters is who shows up.

The confusion starts early. You reach out to someone you know, maybe a partner from a prior deal or a referral from a colleague. But that person often isn’t the one drafting your documents, negotiating terms, or managing your matter. The larger the firm, the more likely the real lawyer on your file will be someone you’ve never met. In really big firms, it may be someone the relationship partner barely knows, if at all.

The usual response is, “Why should I care? The firm has a great reputation.” But that’s like saying it doesn’t matter who shows up on day one as long as both analysts went to Harvard. Reputation and credentials don’t guarantee experience, judgment, or quality.

Another common defense is, “I can rely on the relationship partner to staff the right person.” That sounds sensible until you realize you’ve just outsourced your hiring decision to someone who’s both conflicted and poorly equipped to select or manage the staff. The partner’s incentives are to keep the work in-house, not to identify the best individual for your needs who may be outside of their firm. And by “best,” I mean competent, available, and properly priced. Moreover, few partners have been trained to select or manage other professionals. Being a skilled lawyer or a personable “rain maker” doesn’t make someone a good manager. And the continuing merger mania among law firms makes it increasingly likely that the your relationship partner is struggling to select from and oversee large and increasingly anonymous talent pools.

The deeper issue is that most sophisticated clients don’t have the time or skills to select or manage the legal talent so key to their success. Choosing a firm becomes a poor surrogate. A seasoned general counsel could do this but the selection and management of counsel is extremely time consuming. And some general counsel are “captured” by the firms they engage because they are alums of the firm or they view the firm as a potential future employer. As a result, sophisticated clients have to make multi-hundred-thousand-dollar legal decisions based on relationships, brand names, or inertia.

The industry needs a new role: an independent professional whose expertise lies in identifying, structuring, and managing legal teams — ensuring that the right lawyer, not just the right firm, is on the job. That’s a role our firm fills: we organize and oversee the legal team so our clients can focus on their business, confident that their legal team has been professionally curated and managed.