Case studies
Outcomes, without the names.
Our work is confidential by design, so these are representative engagements — anonymized and composited — illustrating how we approach a search, not a single identifiable client.
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.
Confidential Lateral Partner Search — Houston Energy
How a quiet, market-mapped approach delivered a lateral partner with a portable energy practice — without a public process.
Read the engagementComposite: A DC Regulatory & Compliance Counsel Search
A representative regulatory-compliance mandate run where the talent actually concentrates — the Washington DC metro, home to the largest cluster of law-firm compliance & regulatory specialists in our mapping (1,136). How we map a thin, location-bound field before a single name is approached.
Read the engagementMore representative engagements are added over time. For references relevant to a specific mandate, speak with a consultant.
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 exactly why the DC composite engagement above is run where the field actually sits, not where it is easiest to source. Compliance is also a structurally thin, in-demand field — our live openings feed and Equilar / ACC survey data document the demand backdrop — so mapping the whole cluster matters more, not less.
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.
7546 openings are live now, including 4055 partner & lateral, 3253 associate and 203 counsel roles. Where US associate roles disclose a salary range (1077 postings), the median band runs $235K–$365K.
Browse current legal openings, or — for a quiet, market-mapped search like the engagements above — speak with a consultant.
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.
- Equilar — General Counsel Pay Trends (2025): proxy-disclosure data on senior in-house and compliance leadership compensation, the demand backdrop for compliance talent: equilar.com.
Engagements on this page are representative and composited to protect the firms, companies and candidates involved; they are not a single identifiable client. Internal market figures are point-in-time and indicative, not a guarantee of availability in any given search.
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