Given that law firms spend large amounts of money on recruitment and are obsessed with attracting the best staff, one of the most consistently surprising things about their hiring is that they’re so bad at it.
Once, when the lateral partner market first fired up in earnest in the 1990s, the logic was that it was because they didn’t go through rigorous procedures. But that’s harder to argue now in an age when law firms can spend the best part of a year interviewing senior candidates and are generally very experienced at senior-level recruitment.
