Case studies
Outcomes, without the names.
Our work is confidential by design, so these files are anonymised by sector, stage and city. The clocks are the files. Retention is a programme rate, not a named-client promise.
Every engagement runs against the whole field, not a list.
Before any name is approached, a search is built against a proprietary mapping of the major US & UK legal markets — so the field is real, conflict-cleared and deep, even in a single practice.
- Hundreds of thousands
- of practising lawyers mapped across the major US & UK firms — the field we run every search against, not a contact list.
- Proprietary market mapping (US & UK), May–Jun 2026
- 23,070
- US litigation partners alone — the depth that lets us build a real, conflict-cleared field even in a single practice.
- Proprietary market mapping — US partners by practice
- 1,136
- law-firm compliance & regulatory specialists in the Washington DC metro — the largest single cluster in our mapping.
- Proprietary market mapping — compliance & regulatory, DC metro
Figures are from a single market snapshot (May–June 2026) and describe structure, not movement. Practices are multi-label — a lawyer can sit in more than one — so practice counts run above the headcount total. No individual is named, and our market read is never attached to a named firm.
How we work, illustrated.
First General Counsel — Venture-Backed SaaS, California
The board had outgrown outside counsel. Sitting deputy GCs in software were mapped; shortlist day 24; accepted offer week 10; still in post at 24 months.
Read the engagement For companiesGC Succession — NASDAQ-Listed Medtech, Boston
Blind process, 12-month replacement term in the letter. Shortlist of four at day 24; accepted offer week 11; 12-month programme retention held.
Read the engagement For companiesChief Compliance Officer — NYSE Payments, New York
Audit-committee reporting line; assessed against the DOJ Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs. Shortlist week 3; accepted offer week 10.
Read the engagement For companiesDeputy General Counsel — PE-Backed Industrial, Houston
Carve-out then a public-company cadence. Shortlist 18 days; offer week 8. Of 47 deputy and Head of Legal placements since 2017.
Read the engagement For companiesHead of Legal Operations — Listed Software, Austin
First ops hire, thin pool. Shortlist 21 days; offer week 9. Of 12 legal-operations placements.
Read the engagement For companiesInterim General Counsel — Series C Fintech, San Francisco
Parental leave plus a financing. Day-rate; live on the work on day 6. Of 60+ interim engagements, counted outside the 230+ permanent book.
Read the engagementSix corporate files, anonymised by sector, stage and city. Retention is a programme rate (97% of placed in-house leaders still in seat at 12 months), not a named-client promise. Hub for buyers: legal talent acquisition for companies.
One firm-side file, kept and labelled.
Law-firm laterals remain a live desk. This hub leads with company files because that is the buyer this page now serves first.
Where the work actually concentrates
The same two lenses sit behind almost every mandate: which practice, and which market. Below, the depth of the major US & UK legal markets as we have mapped them — partner-tier specialists by practice, and the largest US metros by mapped headcount.
US partners, by practice
| Practice | Partners |
|---|---|
| Litigation | 23,070 |
| Corporate | 10,774 |
| Finance & Banking | 6,659 |
| Intellectual Property | 5,976 |
Largest US metros, mapped
| Metro | Lawyers mapped |
|---|---|
| New York | 30,152 |
| Washington DC | 18,260 |
| Chicago | 11,031 |
| Los Angeles | 8,882 |
Source: our proprietary market mapping of the major US & UK firms (single snapshot, May–June 2026; structure, not trend). Why depth matters: Washington DC is "the second-largest legal market in the country" (Georgetown Law) and the gravity well for regulatory and compliance work — which is why a CCO search for a NYSE-listed payments company is mapped against the whole cluster, not the people who answered an advertisement.
The same markets, in real openings
These are not the searches above — they are the curated roles open on our board right now, re-counted every time this page is built. A read on where the market is hiring as you read this.
7917 openings are live now, including 4129 partner & lateral, 3127 associate and 190 counsel roles. Where US associate roles disclose a salary range (1097 postings), the median band runs $235K–$365K.
Browse current legal openings, or — for a quiet, market-mapped search like the engagements above — brief a search.
How these figures are derived
Internal figures are real counts from our proprietary mapping of the major US & UK legal markets, taken as a single snapshot (May–June 2026); they describe structure, never a trend. Live-opening counts and the disclosed-pay band are computed at build time from our published, open vacancies. Public market-context claims are cited below.
- Georgetown Law — "Washington, DC Legal Market" (DC = "the second-largest legal market in the country"; ~80,000 lawyers in the DC region; regulatory-defined practice): law.georgetown.edu. Accessed June 2026.
Corporate files on this page are anonymised by sector, stage and city; they are not a named client. Retention figures are programme rates. The Houston energy partner file is a separate, firm-side engagement. Internal market figures are point-in-time and indicative, not a guarantee of availability in any given search.
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Corporate files first: GC, CCO, deputy, legal operations, interim. Law-firm laterals remain a separate desk. No CV form on this band.