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Legal, Risk and Compliance

Profile

Signium lies behind many of the headline moves in the Legal and Compliance sector. Key clients include a significant number of the world’s leading law firms, corporates, ‘The Big 4’ and professional bodies. The knowledge and experience of our specialist consultants combined with our absolute commitment to confidentiality, honesty and integrity sets us apart.

Clients increasingly use us for an array of services – whether for executive search, growth strategy, market mapping, executive coaching or due diligence - they rely on us for a proactive service on all fronts. 

Our focus at the senior end of the Legal market has made us a destination of choice for partners and teams thinking about their next move or needing to tap into our market intelligence, which is unrivalled and the cornerstone of our brand. 

We are only as good as our last completed assignment. We make it our business to understand our clients’ business and a candidate’s motivations. We look to the long term and never compromise with a ‘quick fix’. A significant portion of our workflow emanates from referrals and the exclusive mandates we handle are testimony to the quality of service we provide.

Our Approach

We provide a range of corporate consultancy services designed to help partners and senior lawyers within law firms and large corporates.

Growth Strategy Consulting
Our long-standing presence across the world’s major financial centres combined with the best local expertise invites us into the Boardroom to help devise and implement growth strategy for our clients. Our deep understanding of the legal sector gives us a unique vantage point from which to advise on the need for differentiation, messaging and positioning.

Identifying the Asset
Our proven research processes and market intelligence include in-depth understanding of legal trends, market-mapping and due diligence on selected targets. In fact, the strength of our due diligence  is such that Management ask us to undertake retained due diligence reports on potential senior  hires from other sources.

Implementing Strategy
The key to a successful headhunt approach lies in a clearly formulated strategy, a stream lined hiring process and an informed and bespoke approach to each target. We act as a highly  skilled intermediary to preempt issues and navigate sensitive negotiations.

Retaining the Asset
Our Integration Program goes well beyond 3 months on-boarding: for the first year, we work in close collaboration with HR and Management to devise collaborative Business Plans, to ensure alignment of expectation and open communication.

Private Practice

We are the ‘go to’ firm of choice for partner-level and senior lawyer assignments. Our market- renowned service focuses on targeting partners, senior lawyers, teams and merger candidates.

Our consultants, many of whom  are ex-lawyers, have years of experience in delivering a highly bespoke service to clients including leading US, UK, European and Asia Pacific law firms in their operations across the globe.

Working exclusively at senior level, our market intelligence is the keystone to our success and ensures we have the edge over our competitors.

Long-standing relationships and trust with Senior law firm Management enable us to influence decisions in relation to growth strategy and hiring mandates.

Mergers
As specialists in Senior Executive Search, our merger brokering service extended naturally out of our dealings with Management. Our specialist mergers team has successfully brokered many of the law firm merger deals behind the headlines. Our service includes target mapping/analysis of the combined entity, assessment of compatible cultures, mediating between the parties, assisting with strategy alignment and its articulation; helping overcome pre and post-merger issues.

Our market knowledge and intelligence delivers crucial data that goes well beyond mere paper fit, and is often the decisive factor in securing a successful merger.

Advising Law Firm Partners
We cover equity partners, fixed share partners, partners designate and other senior lawyers.

Decisions
We advise our senior candidates much as we consult with our law firm clients: much of the hard work is front-ended and focuses around triggers of motivation and formulation of strategy. Sometimes, the best advice is to stay put.

Many of our partner candidates have not committed to a move but seek expert market intelligence to inform their decision.

Articulating frustrations, finding out their market worth and demand, analyzing pros and cons – this is all part of a crystallising process.
Moving can be traumatic – our discerning approach means a minimum amount of wasted time.

We treat every partner candidate as a project and accordingly we act on an exclusive basis.

Presentation

Lateral Partner Questionnaire
It is hard to move without having filled in a lateral partner questionnaire. Having created many for our law firm clients, we are experts in this field. This is a crucial document that showcases you to the Executive for Board approval. Much as your personal statement leads to a university offer, so does the LPQ get you voted in to the firm of your choice.

The LPQ serves various functions: to encapsulate your offering, to showcase your skillset, to exhibit your business development skills and to present your figures, past, current and future. We have taken our expertise in this area to an art form honed by long years of practise informed by feedback from Management.

Due Diligence

Why use our Service?

Our service is offered to Professional Services Firms and Corporates who use us to undertake due diligence on lateral  Partner  candidates  for  the  following reasons:

Neutral: we are unbiased and work under the radar, our sources talk to us openly, giving us the full picture on the candidate.
Cost: our reports are priced so that the service can be used early in a hiring process. This allows our clients to be armed with information which enables them to probe in the right areas.
Saving: a negative report avoids costly mistakes (i.e. remuneration, agency fees and wasted management time).
Enhanced market intelligence: our reports provide details of current market conditions in the partner’s practice and sector areas.
Unattributable: our reports are anonymous, below the radar  and unattributable.

Our Process
We speak to clients, competitors, former colleagues and other market sources.

On each partner candidate we provide a report in which we repeat verbatim the input from our sources. Our reports focus on providing detailed information on:

The candidate’s market reputation and rating, in terms of:

Technical ability
Personality – interaction with team, clients, and other professionals
Relationships with clients
Likely portable business

When speaking with clients, we would look to consider:

How they rate the partner technically and in relation to the service he or she provides
Whether a client is likely to be instructing the partner going forwards
Where they might like to see any improvement in the partner/firm’s performance
The criteria for winning that work

In-House

Since the 1950s, our consultants have focused on mandates within the Legal and Compliance sector. Outstanding market intelligence, a reputation for integrity and a focus on maintaining long term client relationships, all combine to make Signium the partner of choice.

In an increasingly regulated and risk aware global business environment, scrutiny around governance issues makes the selection of the right candidate ever more critical.

Our In-house Legal & Compliance Division focuses at the senior end of the market, working on mandates to source senior candidates with strategic input from global GCs through to mid-level Directors, Heads of Privacy, Compliance & Risk officers.

Clients include large multinational corporates through to smaller, dynamic businesses who are looking to bring legal capability in-house as they grow.

A significant number of our mandates are referred to us via existing clients operating in the legal sector – accordingly, and perhaps uniquely, the strength of those recommendations is such that we often get selected without a beauty parade process.

Career Coaching

We offer a range of corporate coaching services in the legal sector, designed to assist our clients in extracting full potential out of their leaders, partners and senior lawyers, enabling them to flourish in their environment.

Executive coaching services
Integration
Assessment
Transition to leadership roles and partnership
Troubleshooting

Outplacement

Signium is the one of the few Search agencies to offer specialist outplacement coaching in the legal sector. This is a unique proposition offering coaching combined with market intelligence and expertise in presentation skills.

Team Members