Robert here.
Robert and I were both recently asked by American Lawyer for our take on the current overseas US lateral hiring market. In preparing an informative article on this topic, Brian Baxter, of AmLaw, interviewed many well regarded attorney recruiters, both in the US and abroad, including but not at all limited to the few recruiters quoted in his article.
Here is an excerpt of his Oct. 9, 2008 article, “Where Do I Send My Resume Now?:
GLOBAL AMBITIONSThe downturn has hit the world financial centers in New York and London the hardest. And with emerging markets like Dubai and Singapore (pictured above) quickly gaining ground as leading financial centers, many out of work lawyers are setting their sights on the Middle East and Asia.
“I’ve been just as busy this year as last, but now there are four times as many candidates looking to go overseas from the U.S.,” says Robert Kinney, managing director of the Hong Kong and New York offices of Kinney Recruiting. “A big part of it is the market slowdown in the U.S., London, and other Western places, but another reason is that many firms with offices abroad were already looking to expand.”
Speaking from Dubai while on a “half-pleasure, half-business” trip to check out the legal landscape, Kinney says U.S. and British law firms in Hong Kong, China, Japan, Singapore, Moscow, and the Middle East are busier than their Western counterparts…
“More people are looking overseas but I don’t necessarily think that more are going,” says Kinney Recruiting’s founder and president, Robert Kinney.
The reasons? For one, greater selectivity.
Just being an associate at a major New York firm won’t cut it. “[Hiring partners in Asia] are looking for the best of the best on paper: top 10 law school, top grades, and all the languages that they used to not care so much about, now they care,” says Kinney.
Jai Pathak, partner-in-charge of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s Singapore office, echoes the point. “Among the younger crowd whom we don’t know, training and pedigree are paramount, and to a lesser extent, but equally important, is sensitivity to the culture and nuances of the local environment,” he says. (Gibson Dunn opened offices in Dubai and Singapore within the past year.)
Also, rather than recruit new talent, many large firms and multinational corporations are relocating current employees, says Mark Anderson, managing consultant of the Dubai office of U.K. legal recruiter Laurence Simons International.
“If you’ve got people in other jurisdictions who are serving an area like the Middle East, from Europe or America, there might be a time when you eventually need someone on the ground here,” Anderson says. “[W]hy not move someone internally rather than go on a recruiting spree, especially in tough times like these?”
In fact, Kinney’s Kinney was in Dubai partly to help law firms with nascent Dubai offices set up expatriate packages–employee perks, including housing allowances and other COLA-related expenses…
The key word is “selectivity”. We are finding that US and British firms in relatively busy (compared to US and other Western markets) overseas markets, such as Hong Kong / China, Japan, Singapore, UAE, and Russia, are becoming increasingly selective in their recruiting, as the number of solid candidates for those markets has been steadily increasing throughout the past year. At present, we estimate that there are well over 4 times as many US associate candidates for these markets than was the case just over one year ago, with the number of very high quality candidates rising even higher. Since late ’07, there has been a steady increase, for many reasons, including but not limitd to the US economic downturn. Therefore, while firms continue to hire in the aforementioned overseas markets, with nearly as many openings as in ’07, it is a much tougher job search for many solid US associates who do not have the most impressive of resumes. In ’07 it was enough to hail from a major US firm’s transactional practice, meet a target firm’s gpa cut off for your law school (or even be slightly under the cut off in many cases), and have good reason for seeking a lateral move to the particular target overseas market. This is not the case today and we expect this trend to continue well into ’09.
At present, the most impressive candidates are receiving multiple offers, whereas many others unfortunately are having trouble getting much traction with their overseas job search. We currently have several top flight junior to mid-level US associate candidates (most lateraling from the US markets) with each 5+ on the ground interviews in HK / China and the Middle East. We have several more such candidates who are mulling over offers in those markets, as well as Russia. However, while such top 20 US firm / top 20 law school (with impressive grades) candidates are having success, there is a big drop off in the success rate of even slightly less impressive on paper candidates. Further, some firms (about 1/3) in Asia are focusing on Mandarin, Korean, Japanese and / or other relevant language skills more than they were a year ago, in many cases not because of a strong need for language skills in a particular new hire, but because they can be selective as they want to be in this market.
In short, the lateral hiring market for US associates in HK / China, Singapore, Japan, UAE, and Russia remain very active, even if not quite at the levels of last year, from a hiring perspective, but the selectivity of firms has increased dramatically in only the past few months.
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