In the panel, which dealt with talent retention and attraction issues, panelists explained that firms’ marketing partners and their teams are seeing their roles become more critical for attracting and retaining talent through deliberate efforts involving messaging, branding, and storytelling. “Marketing partners need to be creative and offer ways to tell their firms’ stories by connecting the dots throughout their firms,” one panelist said, adding that hiring, integration, and on-boarding of new employees are the key areas where this can take place.

As compensation levels have challenged some firms to keep up, the legal industry overall also is experiencing much less stickiness since the global pandemic, one panelist noted, and this is creating an environment in which many legal professionals are looking to move to other firms.

Marketing partners need to be creative and offer ways to tell their firms’ stories by connecting the dots throughout their firms.

Other panelists agreed, stressing that it’s important for firm recruiters and marketing professionals to understand the motivations of their prospective hires in seeking out a move in the first place. Indeed, one panelist noted, underlying the lateral hiring process is the critical question of why do talented people in the legal industry move? “These firm professionals need to understand this motivation on a personal level and create a narrative around the firm that helps bring top talent over,” another panelist offered.

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Surveys over the years have shown that compensation isn’t traditionally the main reason for a move, often ranking behind such factors such as feeling underappreciated and a lack of progression. In fact, a firm’s focus on these other factors — along with other considerations such as professional well-being, mentorship, flexible working arrangements, and improved work culture — can create an overall environment that is far more conducive to fostering higher satisfaction among lawyers who then in turn will want to stay at the firm, resulting in the kind of stickiness that has faded from the legal industry since the pandemic.

Not to mention that fostering a work culture that promotes higher satisfaction among its professionals is a much less expensive proposition than paying increasingly higher salaries each year.

Telling your firm’s story

The panel also observed that it is this internal conflict of feeling underappreciated or not being valued — whether the feeling comes from brand or origination issues or from problems with management or personnel — that is critical for firms’ marketing professionals to understand. And this is important not only to improve recruitment of top legal talent to the firm, but to mitigate any outward migration of the firm’s own top talent. “Whatever the cause that results in lawyers not feeling valued, that feeling is often at the heart of their leaving,” one panelist explained.

A key part of solving this question of why is being able to tell the firm’s story and leveraging that information to improve recruitment and retention, the panelist added.

Another panelist explained that she saw marketing budgets going up across the board because many new hires are insisting on a level of marketing support that they were missing in the places they left. “And that means that firms need to ask themselves, ‘Do we have a marketing team ready and deployed to support our partners?’” she asked.

Other panelists agreed that while platforms and support are important, it is the ability to tell the firm’s story that will determine success much of the time. The panel stressed that those marketing and recruitment professionals who use their resources and cite real-world examples and real-life numbers — such as examples of past hires or laterals who then thrived at the firm — often see those factors make a greater impact.

For example, one panelist described how their own firm — using its own data around previous legal talent hires made over the past decade — determined which individuals succeeded and what particular attributes those hires had. The firm then was able to go into the market for new hires with a clear blueprint for what kind of talent would best thrive at the firm. In this way, the firm saw some clear strategies it could enact to increase the chances that any new hires would thrive at the firm, the panelist explained. “We saw that if we immediately kept new hires engaged in work and didn’t lose sight of giving new and younger talent a voice in the firm, that we were better able to create that glue that keeps our talent satisfied,” the panelist said.

Another panelist agreed, adding that integration during the on-boarding process is also key. “Firms should look for organic situations in which to place new talent to help them find those opportunities within the firm,” the panelist noted, adding that law firms need to invest in their marketing professionals to enable them to tell their firms’ story. “Equipping the messengers to be the hands and feet of the organization brings the brand to light,” she said. “Storytelling is the key.”

Many on the panel agreed that the role of law firm marketing professionals in talent matters is not something that just happens upon hiring but should continue throughout any new hires’ tenure with the firm. “It’s important for the firm to remember why this or that particular person was hired in the first place,” one panelist said. “And it’s not just about whether new hires are meeting expectations or are meeting their metrics — rather, it’s about whether we, as a firm, are meeting their expectations that we set out when they were hired.”

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Whatever the reason, new hires often fill in gaps in a firm’s expertise or enable it to target a specific sector, industry, or client. Often, by bringing on an entire team of lawyers from elsewhere, a firm can expand into new markets or geographies or transform a fledgling practice into a potential powerhouse.

In a new series of Stellar Performance Research reports, we will look at the experiences that �������� Stand-out Lawyers — those nominated by their clients as being exemplary attorneys — have had with such critical topics as lateral hiring, client feedback, recruitment and retention, lawyer engagement, collaboration, and more. In our first two reports we looked at formal client feedback programs and retaining top associates; and now, we examine the experience of lateral hires — why such individuals commonly leave one firm to join another, the factors that contribute to their success once they’ve arrived, and what law firms can do to improve the experience of the laterals they bring in.

The keys to successful lateral hiring

One of the key factors that weighs heavily in the success or failure of any lateral hire is, not surprisingly, their experience with the firm’s integration process. Our previous Stellar Performance research has shown that lateral partners bring roughly 22% of their books of business to their new firms, on average; but that number can reach much higher or shrink to nothing, depending on how well-organized and effective the hiring law firm’s on-boarding and integration process is for new laterals.

Of course, each lawyer will have their own deeply personal reasons for making such a switch, yet our research does uncover a number of common reasons offered by those who do leave.

This report continues our analysis of the experience of �������� Stand-out Lawyers in this area; in fact, of this year’s cohort of 2,400 stand-out lawyers who responded to our survey, roughly 7%, or 156, have been with their firms from between one and three years — and of those, 109 moved from a partner role at one firm into a partner role at another.

But why do law firm partners make this switch? Clearly, law firms on both sides of the lateral hiring experience need to understand why partners make lateral moves, if for no other reason than to optimize the experience of new hires and keep their own quality partners from leaving the firm.

Of course, each lawyer will have their own deeply personal reasons for making such a switch, yet our research does uncover a number of common reasons offered by those who do leave. Indeed, one of the most common reasons for leaving a firm is simply that the lawyer received a better offer elsewhere, indicating interestingly, that many lateral hires were not looking for a new position when they were approached by the firms to which they eventually moved.

But what makes these lawyers open to change in the first place? Our research shows that dissatisfaction with firm leadership and strategy top the list, although compensation issues and a lack of opportunities to grow and progress within their careers were also cited.

Of the processes that law firms can most easily control, however, the firm’s integration process for laterals is a critical factor. The lateral’s view of how they are welcomed and integrated into the firm’s work process and office culture goes a long way in determining if the lateral will be successful and ultimately will stay with their new firm. And again, not surprisingly, the more satisfied a lawyer is with the integration process, the more likely they are to stay with their new firm.

The report also outlines how firms can improve their integration and on-boarding processes to ensure that lateral hires — in fact, all hires — have a positive experience, paving the way for a long-term career trajectory within the firm that benefits both sides.

Indeed, ensuring that if successful is a critical factor in determining if a lateral will stay with their new law firm.

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You can access the full report, “Stellar Performance 2023: Ensuring the success of lateral hires” by filling out the form below: