The legal industry is an intricate, complex web – a vast, global network of law students, associates, partners, government lawyers, interim talent, general counsels, first-year lawyers, retiring lawyers, and lawyers of all of kinds across the world, from L.A. to New York to London to Hong Kong to Sydney.
Most lawyers concentrate on a single strand of that web. Their job is to stay hyper-focused on their clients, their market, their practice – often leading to the feeling that this deeply interconnected industry is more siloed than it really is.
It’s a web many legal consultants and recruiters haven’t had the tools to decipher, to see the ways in which the strands overlap from one corner to the other. They may stay focused on a particular geographic market or subset of the law, which can lead to great specificity within that area, but miss the 1,000-foot view.
Then there’s the team at Major, Lindsey & Africa (MLA). With a team of more than 200 recruiters across 27 global offices, they have dedicated search teams working with lawyers at every career stage, from Big Law partners to Fortune 500 general counsels to law students.
“We are the epicenter of legal recruiting,” says MLA president John Cashman.
That combination of size and scope empowers MLA recruiters to operate within the web’s nucleus – supported by data, relationships and a finely honed system that mirrors the size and complexity of the legal industry itself. From that vantage point, they not only understand the ways in which each thread of the legal industry overlaps but can predict which ways the web will weave next.
“Over time, we can see patterns in this industry that no one else can see,” explains Kirsten Vasquez, partner & vice president of MLA’s Law Firm Recruiting & Interim Legal Talent groups. “Our Law Firm Partner Practice stands as the most experienced and informed in the world – trusted by top-tier firms for our unmatched insight, discretion, and results. With decades of collective expertise, we navigate the complexities of partner moves with precision and purpose. No one understands the partner market like we do. We also have this perspective on in-house, interim legal talent, and associate work, and the interplay between them. Every bit of that intel is accessible for an individual placement, and every individual placement adds to that intel.”
In addition to partner placements, the Associate Practice Group is built on deep market knowledge, global collaboration and a singular focus: helping the world’s top law firms grow their associate teams.
To that end, quality individual advisership and placements are the backbone of the MLA system. “The scale of MLA – both locally and globally across various segments of the legal industry – allows us to bring the right advice at the right time to the right person in the right way,” says Greg Richter, partner and vice president for Retained Search In-House Counsel Recruiting.
“Communicating information just in time is an art form,” Vasquez agrees.
“Just in time” always means “before it’s necessary” – and MLA’s unique ability to see trends into the future has been a game-changer not only for the company, or even exclusively for the clients and candidates they serve – but for the legal industry at large. It means they’re able to anticipate needs, predict trends and provide accessible data and insights to everyone from law firm leaders to C-suite executives.
It’s all part of the unified mission of the hundreds of people who make up MLA across the globe.
From that epicenter, MLA’s work sends ripples across the legal industry, simultaneously shaking and strengthening the web as it’s spun. Says Richter, “It’s a shared purpose to make a difference – to make an impact.”
UNCOVERING THE STORIES BEHIND THE DATA
MLA was founded in 1982 and has built its global presence steadily over the last 43 years. It came under the umbrella of its current parent company, Allegis Group, in 2008 – furthering the heft behind MLA’s already impressive size.
Over time, we can see patterns in this industry that no one else can see.
When Cashman became president in 2017, he made a driving part of his mission ensuring that the company’s size was used to the recruiters’ advantage, while uniting the firm not only ideologically, but systemically. The central question, he says: “How do we make sure that our recruiters are not just thinking about their deals, but about deals across the company?”
That outlook goes back to MLA’s view on the legal industry overall – avoiding siloing and emphasizing a wider lens. In some cases, that collaboration between recruiters is built in: On in-house retained searches, Richter explains, it takes two or three lead search consultants at a minimum to deliver for any client. “Often, those people are not co-located,” Richter explains. “When you’re making a critical hiring decision at a general counsel or CLO level, you often need a global reach. [Our clients] think and act globally. We think and act globally with them.”
To facilitate those wide-ranging searches, the firm implements extensive technological systems to share data across offices, bridging geographic and even departmental gaps to ensure law firm lawyers can make the transition to in-house, associates can seamlessly make the jump to partner and more – all under the MLA roof. Richter explains each of these data points as “vignettes” – every number is a small story.
But with over 40 years of expansive data, it can be difficult to distill information so it’s accessible not only to the recruiters, but also to the clients and candidates they advise.
“The trick is, how do we connect the dots within our company,” Cashman says.
The answer lies in part in the extensive surveys and reports MLA is famous for.
Armed with rigorous data analysis and unmatched financial resources, MLA creates industry-leading guides to the most crucial, data-driven questions on the minds of lawyers and executives, including partner and in-house compensation, lateral partner satisfaction, law department management benchmarking, law firm culture shifts, global in-house counsel market conditions and more. They’ve also curated more specialized surveys, like “The Gen-Z Survey” and the “2025 General Counsel AI Hiring Survey,” as well as specific practice area reports like the “Global Life Science In-House Market Report.” These surveys are made available for free on the MLA website, demystifying vital information.
Within MLA, those surveys act as a compilation of the vignettes Richter mentions, put together to tell a full story – and predict the sequel.
“We can help the industry see what’s a blip, what could be a trend and what could happen next,” says Vasquez. “Stewardship of that knowledge is fun. Because we’ve been around so long, I don’t know of anyone else that has data analysis for that length of time.”
WELL-RESEARCHED PREDICTIONS AND BOLD INVESTMENTS
That data comes to the fore when getting ahead of trends, such as the firm’s fastest-growing department: interim legal talent.
In 2010, when Richter joined MLA, law firms and legal consultants invested heavily in the e-discovery and document review process. “It’s where the money was,” says Richter.
Richter, however, was just making the jump from Allegis Group subsidiary Aerotek, which specialized in staffing, over to the legal recruiting world with MLA. While at Aerotek, Richter headed up contract staffing and interim talent searches – a rarity, he found, in the legal world.
So, Richter started the then-named the Solutions Practice Group – making the “seminal decision” to invest in the newer field of interim legal talent rather than the hot areas of the moment.
“It was really about looking at what MLA did really well, which was placing very seasoned, talented, credentialed lawyers on a permanent basis and figuring out how we could do that on an interim, project or consulting basis,” he says.
Clients were wary. “It was very much a concept sell,” Richter says.
Vasquez, who took over leadership of the group in 2017 and who has restructured it twice to keep ahead of the evolving flexible talent marketplace, agrees: “There was substantial stigma about flexing talent. Now, there is palpable excitement for the options flexible legal talent can provide.” The global business has exploded nearly fourfold since 2016 and helps law firms and corporate legal departments staff according to of-the-moment needs, bringing counsel who are experts in specific case matters or business dealings, as well as augmenting staff, management or temp-to-permanent hires for every client’s unique situation.
While interim talent was once a rare topic, “now, you can’t have a conversation with an in-house general counsel if you can’t talk about hiring permanent or hiring interim talent,” Cashman says. “The ability to do both is unique to us.”
Vasquez explains the draw: “It simply makes the lives of law firm leadership and general counsels easier. We help legal hiring managers and general counsel sleep better at night because they may have a problem that they have to solve right away. So, we get them that talent in 24 to 72 hours.”
“We made a really good decision to engage Kirsten Vasquez, who was able to take what was foundationally built and absolutely move it to a new phase of growth,” says Richter. “The success they’ve had has been remarkable.”
The team was able to make the bold choice to invest in interim talent placements because of the sizable data they had to back up that decision. The same was true when MLA became one of the first legal search firms tied to private equity.
In the last couple of decades, private equity has reshaped the way businesses operate globally. The team at MLA knew they needed to tap into the industry as far back as the early 2000s. At the time, they began working with asset management and investment giants hiring their general counsels, building their legal teams, and helping them spin off their portfolio companies.
The firm’s strength in private equity is again a showcase of the benefits of operating with a large umbrella; because MLA understands both the law firm and corporate worlds, they are able to get ahead of the curve with the resources to provide a significant value to industry-leading companies.
“A critic would say we were in the right place at the right time,” says Cashman. “I would say we were smart enough to be there.”
CURRENT TRENDS
Now, MLA is continuing to invest in the future, including growing its global offices. The team recently added new hires to its London partner practice group as the legal market continues to grow there, and also added a new office in Dublin. The team is also seeing substantially increased market activity in Sydney, as well as more market success in Tokyo.
In other trends, Cashman explains that the requirements for hiring in-house counsel versus a high-powered law firm partner have changed in recent years. Law firms, as always, are focusing on hiring business-driving rainmakers who are unparalleled experts in their legal field. On the corporate side, however, the size of legal departments has been increasing in the last 20 years, turning the job of general counsel much more into a management position than exclusively a legal one.
“The number one trend that I continue to see [for in-house searches] is the need for leadership,” says Richter. “I think the general counsel’s voice is extremely influential today, and while that’s been a trend we’ve seen for a long time, it’s emerged even more in the post-Covid era and downstream. Today’s legal leader must be technologically adept, agile, and responsive to market shifts – guiding the organization to adapt and remain competitive. Executive acumen is now essential; legal teams are expected to be strategic business partners, driving the company toward its goals rather than serving solely as risk managers.
It’s not only general counsels that need to be technologically savvy – legal consultants do, too. MLA has been on the front foot of technological investment, from transitioning to a state-of-the-art database to acquiring new tech platforms.
In 2024, MLA acquired Hire an Esquire, a digital talent search platform that efficiently and automatically matches clients with specialized talent. Much like the interim group, Hire an Esquire offers flexibility and high-caliber talent, but with a tech-centered approach geared for smaller law firms or corporate clients. In serving such a wide range of the legal industry, MLA seeks to find the right services for each market segment, and with Hire an Esquire, they’ve met their match.
To be an advisor along the entire candidate journey is an exciting place to be.
Outside of that market segment, Hire an Esquire’s proprietary technology is also being implemented into MLA’s core work, particularly in the interim group. That technology is continuing to progress, soon to be incorporated throughout the firm. “Our clients seem to love it, and our internal workforce is finding it efficient. They can do more,” says Vasquez.
LOOKING TO THE HORIZON
The team at MLA knows what their clients love and need not only because of statistics, but because that data is built on the organic, personal relationships between recruiter, client and candidate. “We take great pride in being there when someone is coming out of law school all the way to the point of when they're winding down their career,” says Richter. “To be an advisor along the entire candidate journey is an exciting place to be.”
Those individual connections have always been the key to MLA, and they will continue to define the firm’s approach in the decades to come.
Coming up, Cashman says he expects to see MLA continue to penetrate the Fortune 500 space not only in in-house legal searches but going as deeply as the C-suite. With his service as president heading toward MLA’s 50th anniversary, Cashman plans on continuing to build upon MLA’ s legacy to further its future.
“We’ve been in business for 43 years,” says Cashman. “I think the next several years are going to be really exciting for us.”
From that place at the epicenter of the legal industry, Vasquez also has her eyes on the horizon. “Right now, I love being a futurist,” she says. “That’s when I get jazzed up – trying to figure out what’s next for the industry. How do we meet the moment?”
