Lexbridge

When a firm cannot fill a senior role, the constraint is more often confidence than supply
italic textNigel Goldsworthy | Managing Director, Lexbridge Group

There is a conversation I have from both directions, usually within the same fortnight.

There are, of course, genuine shortages in particular disciplines and locations. But many apparently impossible searches are being lost for a different reason. A firm tells me there is nobody out there. The market is short of good corporate lawyers, or employment lawyers, or whoever it is this quarter. The role has been open for five months. The two candidates who looked right both went elsewhere.

Then I speak to a senior lawyer who was interested in that firm and did not pursue it. They rarely say the role was wrong. They say they could not work out what they would actually be joining.

Those two accounts describe the same search. Only one of them is a shortage.

Silence gets read as risk

A lawyer at partner or legal director level is not making a job move. They are moving a practice, a set of client relationships and years of accumulated credibility, and they are doing it once, with restrictive covenants attached.

A candidate weighing that will forgive a great deal. Difficult economics, a systems programme running late, a team that has not settled since the merger — all of it can be workable. What they will not do is accept a gap where the answer should be.

This is the part firms consistently underestimate. When a question is met with a vague answer, the candidate does not record “unknown”. They fill the gap with the worst plausible version and price it in. Silence about integration, economics or progression is not neutral. It is read as bad news being managed.

What a senior candidate is actually assessing

Behind the polite questions in a second interview, a senior lawyer is trying to establish eight things. A firm that can answer them plainly is a long way ahead of one with a better brand that cannot.

• The commercial reason this appointment exists, as opposed to the job description.
• What the team and the operating model will look like once any integration is finished.
• The work that exists today, and the work the hire is expected to create.
• Decision rights: what they can approve, and what goes elsewhere for approval.
• How performance will be measured, and by whom.
• The honest stage of any merger, systems or restructuring programme.
• The working pattern in practice, not in policy.
• What the firm learned from the last senior hire, or the last acquisition.

That final one is the most revealing and the least often prepared. A firm that can describe what it got wrong last time and what it changed is telling a candidate that it is capable of learning. A firm that has never got anything wrong is telling them something else.

Consolidation has raised the bar

This has become harder to avoid because so many firms are now hiring while something else is changing underneath them. The SRA has recently consulted on proposals requiring firms to notify it of contemplated mergers and acquisitions once they reach heads of terms, and its existing warning notice already asks acquiring firms to consider whether they have the competence, systems, staffing and capacity for what they are taking on.

Senior candidates are asking a version of the same question, and they are asking it earlier than they did five years ago. If your firm is mid-integration, that is not a reason to delay a search. It is a reason to prepare an honest account of where the integration has got to, what is not finished, and what that means for the person joining.

A candidate who joins on an accurate picture and finds it accurate becomes an advocate. A candidate who joins on an optimistic one and discovers the gap is a resignation with a twelve to eighteen month fuse, and the cost of that lands well beyond the recruitment fee.

You do not need a flawless story

The instinct in a competitive market is to present the firm at its best and manage the difficult parts once someone has accepted. In my experience that reliably produces the opposite of what is intended. It selects for candidates who did not ask hard questions, which is not the group you are trying to hire from at this level.

The firms that fill senior roles quickly are not the ones with the cleanest narrative. They are the ones whose narrative survives careful questioning. That is a lower bar than perfection and a much harder one than polish.

Confidence is often the central part of the fix. Before concluding that a market is short of people, it is worth testing whether the account of the opportunity would withstand thirty minutes with a sceptical senior lawyer.
If it would not, the search is not competing on talent supply. It is competing on confidence, and losing.

A conversation before a brief

I spent more than thirty years as a partner in private practice and then as Head of Legal and Group Company Secretary of a FTSE 100 business, hiring lawyers and being hired. Lexbridge works on senior legal appointments from that perspective rather than from a database.

If a search is stalling, or you are about to open one while the firm is changing shape, the most useful first conversation is usually about how the opportunity is being described rather than about candidates.

Email info@lexbridge.group
or visit lexbridge.group.

Sources: SRA, “SRA consults on strengthened notification requirements”, consultation closed 17 August 2026; SRA, “Mergers, acquisitions and sales of law firms” warning notice.