This is Robert writing for both Robert and myself this morning since Robert’s loaded for bear with meetings in Hong Kong and China this week and has no time. If you’re in Hong Kong this week, contact us and we’ll try to set you up with Robert. He may have some time Thursday or Friday.  Alternatively, Robert will be in New York on Monday and both Robert and I will be in New York in a few weeks for meetings. Our schedules are loading up, so please contact us at asia at kinneyrecruiting dot com to set a time.

Since my personal recruiting practice predominately involves work with partner candidates assessing their options, this is my main area of expertise. I don’t know (off of the top of my head as others do here) how much each firm is paying in housing allowance to associates and I tend to lose track of the $10,000 difference between what one firm may pay in base expat over the other. I know that these things matter to many people, but the associates we are placing today are all likely partners at top law firms in the future. These differences will be absorbed in a single month’s pay within a few years for these candidates (top firms routinely pay their partners $200-250K in housing/expat allowance, just to give readers a point of reference), but there will still be occasions when a change of law firms will make sense. When would that be? What would be the triggers that might cause you to look again after a few years of partnership? Here are a few vignette’s from our recent experiences that might shed some light for you. I’ve changed names and details as appropriate to protect the identities of the firms and candidates.

1. Up/Down Escalator. In many cases the trajectory of a partner’s practice over a period of years can go from upward to downward simply because of relatively minor platform issues that do not destroy a practice but just retard its rate of growth. Rate flexibility might be more limited than makes sense, for example, or the growth clients in a practice area might be those that are more traditionally served by another firm. When the skill set represented by that partner is needed at another firm whose overall trajectory in the practice area is upward, while the existing firm has flattened or gone to downward in trajectory, we call this the “up/down escalator”. The idea is that by stepping from the downward escalator to the upward one, serious issues can be averted with (relatively) small effort. The partner just steps from one firm to the other and continues moving ahead in market share, client confidence, and, ultimately, in compensation. Many law firms this year have looked closely at opportunities to shore up practices by attracting this sort of lateral candidate who can readily be plugged into the existing firm practice. In one situation we saw recently a certain partner at one of a major firm’s Asia offices had the opportunity to move across to an upward escalator with a multi-year guarantee at 25% over his average compensation during the same period.

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