Private Capital & Asset Management legal recruitment.

The full senior stack on the manager side and the matching practices on the firm side. In-house, that means general counsel, chief compliance officers (often the same person at smaller managers), fund-formation and Investment Advisers Act regulatory counsel, deal and M&A lawyers, fund-finance specialists and SEC examination / enforcement-defense counsel — see in-house counsel recruiting and compliance recruitment. For law firms, we place partners, groups and associates whose work maps to the same sub-sectors — partner recruiting and associate recruiting.

Because the demand has two engines running in opposite phases. Every private fund is a regulated entity needing fund, adviser and deal counsel — and around 23% of the SEC's 583 FY2024 enforcement actions involved investment advisers or investment companies (Proskauer Rose, 2024). When transactional volume cools, regulatory and enforcement pressure picks up the slack — the SEC ordered a record $8.2B in financial remedies in FY2024 (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 2024), and a single August 2024 off-channel-communications sweep drew $390M from 26 financial firms (Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, 2024). That structural, two-sided demand is why specialist fund and compliance lawyers stay in short supply.

It is the central hiring question in this market. At smaller managers a single lawyer typically wears the GC, CCO and corporate-secretary hats; as AUM scales, the function splits into specialized teams. The wrong call cuts both ways — split too early and you over-hire, split too late and you carry personal regulatory accountability on a lawyer who is stretched across three jobs. We assess where you sit on that curve and recruit for the seat you actually need next. See what we do for companies and our methodology.

Because a generalist can read a CV but cannot judge whether a lawyer has genuinely closed fund formations under the Advisers Act, run an adviser compliance program through an SEC exam, or carried an enforcement matter versus merely sat near one. With investment advisers and companies caught up in around 23% of the SEC's FY2024 enforcement actions (Proskauer Rose, 2024) and a thickening web of marketing-rule, Form PF and recordkeeping obligations, that judgment is the search. We map the regulatory regime, the strategy and the deal flow before we map candidates.

High cash plus carried-interest upside against personal regulatory accountability and lean, all-hours teams. As CCO, a lawyer can carry individual liability for the adviser's compliance program, and at a smaller manager that lawyer is also the GC and the corporate secretary. The upside — and it is real — is carry and proximity to the investment engine. We help senior counsel weigh the seat honestly and tell you which managers actually build the expertise you want next. Read our salary insights first to calibrate.

Confidentially. We work with senior in-house counsel, CCOs and legal-operations leaders at managers, and with law-firm partners and associates who want to move within or across private equity, venture, credit, hedge funds, real assets and family offices. The first step is a discreet conversation about what you want next — not an application into a black box. You can submit your CV in confidence.