Five years ago, the legal recruitment landscape in Germany looked very different. Around this time my then boss sent an apparently innocuous e-mail enquiring whether any of the legal recruitment consultants within our organisation spoke German. As a result I found myself establishing an office in Frankfurt in early 1999.

At that time, the concept of a dedicated legal recruitment consultancy was alien to the German market. Indeed, at a recruitment evening hosted by a major UK law firm in London shortly after we had opened in Frankfurt, a director of one of our competitors suggested that we had taken leave of our collective senses. “German lawyers just do not move,” he said.