P2P

winter22

Peer to Peer: ILTA's Quarterly Magazine

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44 P E E R T O P E E R : I L T A ' S Q U A R T E R L Y M A G A Z I N E | W I N T E R 2 0 2 2 All that said, perhaps the largest driver of all was alluded to above. It's the aggressive competitiveness among law firms that first emerged after 2008. Firms that seek prosperity through growth, or that want to further round out their offer, can choose the M&A route and/or can target the acquisition of talent from other firms, hopefully bringing new clients and matters with them. Highly acquisitive firms will seek rainmakers with the capacity to bring in lots of new clients to turbocharge their expansion. Finally, this competitiveness may be thought of as the preserve of large law – but there's no reason why it should be. Certainly, it's the large firms that are now retaining external resource to target and poach lawyers or that have appointed Chief Talent Acquisition Officers. They're also offering other incentives: one firm is apparently awarding a $50,000 bonus to lawyers who bring in valuable new hires. 2 That said, medium-sized and even small firms can also make lateral hires to inject growth. Whether it's a single lawyer with a handful of clients and cases, or a whole department or team of lawyers bringing corporate clients and potentially many thousands of matters – lateral hiring is now a well-recognized route to quick growth that isn't going to go away. Management of offboarding Given this backdrop of permanently increased matter mobility, what then are the issues and the key governance considerations that firms should pay attention to? Helpfully they can be neatly divided into the challenges of off boarding data, and those of onboarding data – and firms should have policies, systems, processes and procedures for both. The bad news is that off boarding is the sticky end of the lollipop. It promises negligible upsides (the chance to burnish a reputation for efficiency?) and a lot of unrewarding and unremunerated work, which should only be triggered by the receipt of a client transfer request. However, often the first the firm knows about anything happening is when a lawyer gives in their notice or a client transfer request is received. At which point the lawyer may submit a list of the firm's clients that they expect to take with them. The keyword here is "expect". It's very often the case that a defecting lawyer, or team of lawyers, will over- estimate the number of clients that will follow them to the new firm. So, caution should be exercised. The firm shouldn't immediately assume that all the listed clients will leave. In addition, remember that even if the departing lawyer was the main client contact, the firm continues to have a contractual relationship with the client by virtue of the engagement agreement. Also, firms must remember that throughout the transition period clients are still entitled to competent and unimpeded representation, and that their matter transfer should not affect the client adversely. Notwithstanding, unseen by your firm, the new firm will probably be given the same list of would-be defecting Q 4 W H I T E P A P E R S 1. https://www.chambers-associate.com/career-moves/trends-in-lateral-recruitment/10-trends-affecting-legal-recruitment-in-2022 and https://www. thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/legal/state-of-the-legal-market-2022/ 2. https://www.law.com/international-edition/2022/03/14/recruiters-expect-lateral-demand-to-continue-but-firms-growth-may-be-hampered/?slretu rn=20220622104217

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