How to Get the Best Legal Talent for Your Company

How to Determine What Kind of Legal Services You Need

To engage the right talent, a business must first identify its own legal needs. Different businesses have different requirements , so there can be no single solution. Internal general counsel or an executive management team can develop a detailed understanding of the business’s particular requirement. Regardless of what it is, no matter how simple or complex, there is the right match for every situation.

Where to Go to Find the Right Legal Professionals

A variety of platforms and networks exist for businesses looking to connect with qualified legal professionals. For those who prefer a traditional approach, there are online legal directories where lawyers profile their work. These platforms, like FindLaw, feature lawyer databases that are searchable by focus area, although the lawyers featured have to pay for placement. They offer broader tools for consumers to search for lawyers by location and practice area. LawPeople.com is another directory that lists lawyers according to their area of practice and location. Another type of pre-screened lawyer listing service is Avvo. It provides a free question-and-answer platform for consumers to get answers from lawyers, but it requires an extensive attorney profile. Finally, Intuit has created Rocket Lawyer, which connects consumers with low-cost legal resources.
Along these same lines, Google AdWords offers pay per click (PPC) ads for lawyers based on search terms. Almost every major city has its own search engine style listing, as well as other forms of advertising, such as a subscription service like Lawyers.com or SuperLawyers.com.
Professional networks specifically for lawyers also provide access to pre-screened professionals. For example, Rocket Lawyer allows lawyers to post their profiles, and contracts for the attorneys to file their profiles with various public websites. Martindale.com, now owned by LexisNexis, uses peer-review and client surveys to identify rated lawyers. LinkedIn is a powerhouse among professional networks, with one study suggesting it is the most popular social network for law firms.
Taking these platforms and networks a step further are freelance legal platforms, such as UpCounsel, onCall Counsel, and Counsel on Call. Through these websites, companies can find lawyers who work remotely for a flat fee. Airbnb for Lawyers, Hire an Esquire, LawLancer, Counsel Quest, Oxygen, and LawDroid are some of the newer models that lenders are increasingly following. You can also find women who offer freelance legal support through websites like Axiom and LawGives, and can donate time to causes through LawGives.

How to Test Legal Skills and Experience

When evaluating potential legal hires for your business, one of the most critical factors to consider is their skills and experience. Within this broader category, it pays to look deep into your prospects’ background, specialties, and particular areas of expertise. There are a number of ways to consider expertise.
Professional credentials – such as an LLM (i.e. master of law) in a particular area or years of experience in a particular practice area. An LLM is a formal graduate academic degree that demonstrates expertise from a time-commitment and curriculum-development perspective. A lawyer who has invested the time to pursue an LLM may very well be committed and interested in the subject matter of that degree. However, this may also be true of those who have pursued personal study (e.g., independent research via books/published articles/a network).
Specific practice area specialization. Some lawyers select a particular area of law in which to build their career, and involve themselves deeply in this practice. This is reflected in practice area-specific associations (see below), as well as in their publication history, areas of focus, and types of clients or deals.
More than just associations and affiliations. When reviewing an attorney’s resume (or bio), review what professional associations they are involved with. This can give you insight into the level of devotion they demonstrate to the particular practice area. Organizations often have different levels of "member." For example, a lawyer may be an "active member," "executive committee member," "founding member," "sustaining member," or a member of a "task force" of a particular association. All of these indicate a level of commitment and experience to the specific area of practice and indicate the lawyer’s depth of legal knowledge as applied to real-world situations.
Previous employment, education, and experiences. An attorney’s work experience, where they went to school, and what they did before becoming an attorney is often assigned a lot of weight when looking at legal talent. This may not be necessary, and it may even be distorting the selection process. Attorneys grow and develop as they hone their skills both in practice and outside of it. They are not necessarily the same person that they were when they first started practicing or through their academic careers. That’s why, as mentioned above, it is important that experience not be considered in isolation. It should be part of the entire analysis of the candidate.
Client testimonials. All those previously mentioned factors are meaningful, but how do you really know if a legal professional has the experience they say they do? There are often no better sources of information on this than from their previous clients. One good way to get this information is through an interview process, or simply by calling the references provided in their resumes.
You can also find client testimonials on their firm’s website or profile pages.

How Technology Can Help You Access Legal Talent

The legal industry is already witnessing the impact of technology: AI is helping smart business owners and in-house counsel draft better contracts, while natural language processing helps operations executives review proposals more quickly. Machine learning even allows lawyers to forecast which cases are most likely to win, helping them choose which cases to take on and which to reject . However, the impact of technology on the hiring process is no less dramatic. Rather than sifting through endless resumes, business owners can turn to technology for more efficient and effective screening processes, giving them more time for business development and company building. AI screening tools also help businesses reduce bias in the first round of hiring, only passing the resumes of applicants who meet a minimum score.

The Most Cost-Efficient Ways to Get Legal Talent

When budgets are tight and the need for legal talent is pervasive, it often times feels as if businesses might be forced to deploy creative strategies to succeed. One of those strategies is project-based hiring. Small to medium-sized businesses often need only short-term legal talent who are willing to take on projects that are short in duration and have a specific scope. Living in the era of gig-economy, there is no shortage of exceptional lawyers who are willing to undertake project-based employment. These freelance lawyers can aid business with legal approvals and establish or sever relationships with vendors, service providers, and third parties. Oftentimes, they can even work remotely from anywhere in the world, making them cost-effective for short-term projects that do not require in-person visits or contact. For example, a freelance lawyer might be tasked with drafting legal documents for a project or posting them in internal systems, such as SharePoint or an internal document management system. They might be called upon to vet contracts, apply (or renew) licenses, permits, and certifications, and conduct legal research. Alternatively, they might just be called upon to file internal documents. Freelance lawyers are an economical way to expand existing in-house legal departments by augmenting or replicating existing talent to meet excess demand for legal services. They are a viable cost-effective strategy for companies that need to reduce the law firms that they use to represent them on a particular matter. In the non-legal space this approach is often referred to as co-sourcing and is already a common practice.
The demand for legal talent has changed significantly over the past twenty years. The great recession forced unprecedented change in the way that businesses think about staffing their labor and talent needs. By 2015, nearly 30% of the total labor force in the United States was engaged in alternative work arrangements. This figure includes the gig-economy, freelance workers, "1099" workers, or as my colleague likes to say: the "agile" workforce. Add to this workforce the U.S. State Department’s allowance in 2000 for foreign nationals with advanced degrees to work in the United States on a temporary basis, which allowed U.S. companies to tap into a global talent market for the first time, and you have the perfect storm. This storm disrupted the traditional way that businesses hire and retain legal talent.
In the fall of 2018, the American Bar Association (ABA) will begin publishing the American Bar Association Career Center Temporary Attorney List, a national listing of temporary attorneys. This service is meant to connect businesses in need of temporary legal talent with temp attorneys looking for work in the legal space. It is too soon to say whether the ABA’s attempt to create a marketplace for temp-attorneys will have any impact at all. However, given the increasing use of temporary or project-based legal talent, overall, the service may find a niche.
As businesses yearn for project-based legal help, the remote workspace has grown to become more popular and technologically advanced. Video conferencing tools, like Zoom, make virtually meeting with a remote counsel as easy as dowloading an app or logging onto a meeting room link. Collaboration tools make it easier for teams to share documents. Legal project management is quickly becoming a go to practice as handling routine tasks in concept and making small edits to documents in real time becomes easier and easier.
Embracing technology, like the state department’s recognition of the global talent market in 2000, has significantly changed the way that businesses think about hiring legal talent. Companies are seeking legal help using new models for work, and new models for how they structure their business. Temporary, project-based, remote work is a part of this change. For now, it remains to be seen whether the ABA’s efforts will fuel this change.

How to Establish Long-Term Legal Relationships

Just as your business requires multiple disciplines to operate at its highest level, a law firm brings together numerous specialties and experts. Whether you need expertise in obscure statutory or regulatory matters, or in the negotiation and drafting of an agreement essential to your company , an attorney may have an area of practice they are particularly good at that may be outside of your initial need for their services. More importantly, they may be able to refer you to a colleague or other counsel with experience in a particular line of business. When you cultivate a relationship with your legal expert, you reap the benefits of their experience and insight into the needs of your business.