Case study: a niche construction counsel brief, placed in two weeks
The brief
A national residential developer and construction company came to us with an in-house legal role that looked, on paper, like a nightmare to fill. Senior in-house construction legal counsel, maternity cover, fixed term contract, based out of their North West office two days a week. Non-negotiable on the two days. Non-negotiable on the construction background.
This one sat in the North West, but it's the kind of in-house legal brief we now run UK-wide, from London and the South East through the Midlands, the North, Scotland and beyond. The location changes but our process doesn't!
The day-to-day was bread and butter for any decent construction lawyer: JCT design and build contracts, subcontractor packages, collateral warranties, bonds, professional appointments, the full lifecycle from inception to completion. The catch was everything sitting above that. The larger schemes, the ones north of £30m, come with forward funding arrangements, and the structures get complicated fast. A 3-5 PQE in-house legal counsel could handle the documentation comfortably. The funding work needed a construction counsel with six years behind them and the scars to prove it.
So the ideal hire was a construction specialist, six-plus PQE, comfortable with forward funding, available now on an interim or fixed term basis. The client, a seasoned construction lawyer himself, knew exactly how optimistic that was. He told us as much in the first call.
The reality
We don't dress these things up, and neither did the client. The market was working against us. Funding pressure has slowed development pipelines across the sector, which sounds like it should make in-house legal recruitment easier. It doesn't. It keeps good people sitting tight within law firms and other in-house teams and makes the genuinely specialist construction counsel harder to tempt out.
To his credit, the client had thought about this properly. Plan A was interim or temporary cover from someone who could walk in and do the lot. Plan B was to pivot towards an ambitious junior in-house counsel, smart enough to pick it up but not the finished article, with the heavier funding work held internally for a while. Both were workable. We just needed to find out which one the market would actually give us.
The outcome
It gave us Plan A. We found an in-house legal counsel who stacked up on the technical detail, was available immediately, and was happy with the arrangement. We were happy with the time to appoint - from when we were instructed on the search, to the point we placed the candidate was just two weeks.
The work itself did most of the selling once we had the right person looking at it. Live hotel and residential schemes, an in-house legal team you'd actually want to sit with, and a role where you're in the room for the design and the intent rather than cleaning up the mess after it. That's the job a lot of in-house construction lawyers say they want and rarely get.
A hard brief, an honest conversation about what was realistic, and a fast result that us and the client (and the successful applicant!) are very happy with.
About us
We're a specialist legal recruiter placing general counsel, heads of legal, legal directors, construction counsel and in-house legal counsel right across the UK, on permanent, fixed term, interim, temporary and maternity cover bases. Wherever your in-house legal team sits in the UK, from London to the North, we can run a focused search and move quickly when it counts. If you're a general counsel or head of legal building out a team, or an in-house counsel weighing up your next move, we'd be glad to talk.
