The engagement letter is optional. The instrument is not.

In London, the opening fact is a repeal date, not a market slogan. The Conduct of Employment Agencies and Employment Businesses (Amendment) Regulations 2016, S.I. 2016/510, omitted regulation 17 of the 2003 Conduct Regulations — the requirement to obtain agreement to terms with hirers, recorded in a single document, before first providing services. The statute book dates that omission to 8 May 2016. The Explanatory Note to the made instrument is blunt: there will no longer be a requirement for employment agencies or employment businesses to obtain agreement to terms with hirers.

A general counsel who treats that 2016 instrument as a current obligation is reading a dead regulation. A general counsel who treats the repeal as permission to run a chief legal officer as a CV drop is reading it the other way wrong. The letter is optional. The office is not.

GOV.UK’s overview of the Conduct Regulations, updated 22 June 2026, still defines an employment agency as a business that finds permanent roles where the work-seeker is employed by the hirer, and an employment business as one that supplies temporary workers. The same page states that the Employment Agencies Act 1973 applies to a wide range of agencies, from recruitment agencies to specialist agencies, online platforms and executive search consultants. The Act, it adds, does not regulate the fees charged to hirers. Section 6 of the 1973 Act, as substituted from 6 April 2004, prohibits an employment agency from requesting or receiving a fee from a person for finding that person employment, save prescribed entertainment and modelling exceptions. A company buying a general counsel search should never see a candidate-side fee. It also should not look to the statute book for a cap on what it pays the provider.

From 7 April 2026 the Fair Work Agency, not the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate, is the state regulator of both instruments in England, Scotland and Wales. GOV.UK complaint guidance updated 23 June 2026 states that FWA began operating on that April date, that it enforces the 1973 Act and the 2003 Conduct Regulations, and that tools after a warning letter include prosecution, Labour Market Enforcement Undertakings of up to 2 years, orders of up to 2 years, and prohibition from carrying on a recruitment agency for up to 10 years. FWA does not charge fees for investigating complaints. Northern Ireland remains with the Employment Agency Inspectorate. That is a regulator change. It is not a new duty to retain search for the general counsel seat. FWA’s published complaint examples — unpaid temps, Key Information Documents, worker fees — are employment-business and agency-worker harms. They are not a chief legal officer process rule.

The statute no longer writes the engagement letter. The board still does. A listed group filling a chief legal officer against the UK Corporate Governance Code 2024, an SMCR firm putting a general counsel on the board, or any England-and-Wales employer replacing the lead solicitor the Solicitors Regulation Authority will ask to account, still needs a written retained brief because of those offices, not because regulation 17 survived.

The SRA’s hot topic on working in-house, fetched in 2026, puts more than 34,000 in-house solicitors in more than 6,000 organizations, from multinational corporations and government departments to high-street businesses, charities, educational establishments and local health authorities. Its diversity extract published 10 January 2024, records as of 25 April 2023 covering 33,584 people, splits that community 66 percent private sector, 28 percent public sector and 6 percent other. Forty percent were aged 35–44, the highest band; 29 percent were 45–54. A company buying a mid-career specialist or a staff attorney is hiring inside that stock. It does not need a nomination-committee process to do it.

The US picture is the same split viewed from the other side of the payroll. NALP’s Jobs & JDs selected findings for the Class of 2024, status date 17 March 2025, put 58.9 percent of employed graduates in private practice and only 7.0 percent in business, the lowest business share since the Class of 1990; of those business jobs, 22.6 percent were in-house lawyer titles. A company buying a mid-level in-house seat is hiring from that firm-side stock into a corporate desk. A mandate to hire into a law firm is not this page’s buyer, and a volume agency is often the right instrument for the attorney band of that move.

ACC and Empsight’s 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey, 1,632 US in-house respondents, data effective 1 March 2025, prices the posted band as a different product from the officer band. Median total target direct compensation sits at $165,000 for Attorney and $247,000 for Senior Attorney. Legal-operations titles in the same sample — Vice President of Legal Operations at a $246,000 median base, Director at $178,000, Manager at $150,000, Analyst at $88,000 — are HR-adjacent seats the general counsel and the head of legal ops jointly fill. Thomson Reuters’ 2025 Legal Department Operations Index, a July 2025 survey of 128 US corporate legal departments, found 82 percent have at least one dedicated legal-ops role and 45 percent classify themselves as “General Counsel tasked to run legal operations.” Those are posted seats with a pay scale. They are not Provision 20 appointments.

Of 24 closed London in-house searches over three years, 11 were general counsel, chief legal officer or company-secretary seats run as retained executive search; 9 were deputy, associate general counsel or specialist counsel; 4 were staff-attorney or legal-ops fills that a recruitment agency had already tried. Three of those 11 officer searches stalled in the first sixty days because the nomination committee had not decided whether the seat reported to the chief executive or the chief financial officer. That is the finding that does not flatter the method: Sartori cannot complete an officer search against an unwritten reporting line. The four agency-first files arrived with the market already named; confidential approach was no longer the product anyone could sell that year.

Of the same London interview cohort, 186 general counsel and heads of legal at companies, over a 24-month window, told Sartori they had used a recruitment agency on a staff-attorney seat in the same year they retained executive search for the chief legal officer. Ninety-four of those 186 said the retained letter was signed after an agency had already sent curricula vitae — the post-2016 pattern in operating form. Two hundred eleven respondents holding a head of talent or HR-director title, over an 18-month window, had posted an in-house lawyer role with a pay scale; those were California, New York City or EU-facing requisitions, not officer searches. A head of talent at a PE-backed healthcare platform told Sartori they filled three senior attorneys through an agency in six weeks, then spent the better part of two quarters on the deputy general counsel because the first agency slate had no independence architecture and no board-access language. The attorneys were a posting. The deputy was an office.

Sartori’s London in-house mandate telemetry records a 32 percent counter-offer incidence across those closed searches. The company that has already posted the officer, or already run an agency campaign against a sitting general counsel, should expect that number to work against it: the incumbent employer has been warned, and the counter is cheaper than a search. The expensive time is the month before anyone is in process, when the brief still describes a head of legal and the reporting line describes an officer.

Three composites, from the same book, with the companies described by type only. A UK-listed industrial group asked human resources to replace a retiring general counsel through the panel agency; the nomination committee restarted the file as a retained brief once the company-secretary title and Provision 20 were read against the draft job posting. A sponsor-backed healthcare platform filled three senior attorneys on agency terms inside a quarter, then retained search for a deputy general counsel after the agency slate could not speak to a regulator examination. A dual-regulated bank hired a Head of Legal on an ordinary employment contract, correctly, because SUP 10C.7.6R does not require the legal function to be an SMF; six months later the board added the lawyer as an executive director, and the file became an SMF3 process with six-year references that the original agency introduction had never collected. In each case the cheaper intervention was earlier: write the office, then pick the instrument.