The Associate Pirate

As I’ve mentioned before, this is my personal blog, and it’s not endorsed by my employer, Lateral Link. But since the bulk of this blog is going to be about my experience as a legal recruiter, and Lateral Link is where I do that, the company’s obviously going to come up from time to time.

So let me give you a quick sense of what we’re about.

Lateral Link was founded by a group of Harvard Law grads who became associates at prominent law firms and discovered, to their dismay, that legal recruiters would call them non-stop. They’d call them in the morning. They’d call them during lunch. They’d call them in the moments just before they finished typing that one key sentence in the brief. They’d use fake names to get past the switchboard operators and secretaries. They’d leave cryptic voicemails that sounded like they might be clients, so that associates would call them back.

If you’ve ever practiced law at a really good firm, you probably know the experience.

And you probably didn’t like it much.

Neither did the founders of Lateral Link.

So they decided to build a new model — with more efficiency, and less irritation. The concept is actually pretty simple. Instead of calling every associate at a good firm from a good school to see if they’d like to hear about a particular job, Lateral Link maintains a database of every job they can find. And if a lawyer from a top school, with experience at a top firm, would like to search the database, they can get an account and do just that. In fact, they can set the account to e-mail them whenever Lateral Link finds a new job that matches their interests. And then once an attorney decides that he or she is really ready to change jobs, Lateral Link meets with the attorney to talk about their background and their options, reviews their resume, gets their applications in order, submits them to the law firms and companies they’re interested in, and then generally helps with the process until there’s an offer on the table.

It’s a really cool model that I think blends the best parts of services like Monster and traditional placement agents. I’m psyched to be a part of it.