We spoke to Liz Rooke (Global Head of Recruitment), Mark Coates (Partner Recruitment, Senior Manager), and Matthew Cowan (Recruitment Manager) at Clyde & Co about how their lateral recruitment teams use Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) to do more direct sourcing and gather market intel. 

Clyde & Co is a global law firm providing a complete service to clients in its core sectors of insurance, transport, energy, infrastructure and trade & commodities.

Direct sourcing of talent

Most of the firm's lateral hiring for key practice areas is now handled in-house, using Pirical to build comprehensive talent pipelines.

The Challenge

Clyde & Co employs over 5,500 people across nearly 70 offices worldwide and as an organisation, is always looking to grow. As such, the firm makes a significant number of lateral Associate and Partner hires every year.

Clyde & Co's candidate sourcing model had traditionally relied quite heavily on external recruitment agencies. However, when Liz joined the team in 2022, one of her key goals was to increase the volume of later hires made internally and reduce the firm’s agency spend.

Having already used Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) for a few years, the recruitment team started to increase their usage as part of the new strategy to focus more on direct sourcing, averaging around 14,000 annual searches over the last 3 years.

"Tools such as Pirical have been critical to building more market knowledge and expertise within our recruitment team. This has helped the firm do more direct sourcing, relying less on external agencies and the cost that carries. At the non-Partner hiring level, we've reduced our agency usage globally to around 20%."

Liz Rooke

Global Head of Recruitment, Clyde & Co

The Solution

Use Pirical to find more candidates internally and build ready to go talent pipelines

With Pirical's searchable database of lawyers, Clyde & Co's recruitment teams can find relevant candidates and create comprehensive pipelines of talent that are constantly kept up-to-date.

These candidate lists can then be easily shared with Partners for discussion and refined further.

"We'll create lists for Insurance, Corporate, Real Estate etc, then refine each one and export it. In the past year or so, it looks like we've created around 150 lists" Matt pointed out.

Improve market knowledge & gather competitor intelligence

"As an organisation we've always looked to make sure we have strong market knowledge", Liz said.

The market data and competitor intel available on Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP), helps Clyde & Co stay up-to-date with shifts in the market and understand how competitor teams are structured.

"You can bring up a firm's data across various offices and see how many people they have in certain teams, eg. 4 Partners in office x doing this and 10 doing this in office y. That's really useful to see", Matt explained.

The Result

Pirical as a critical tool in the recruitment teams' workflow and a reduced reliance on agencies

Among the fee-earner hiring teams at Clyde & Co, Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) is typically used several times a week. Both the experienced-hire and Partner-level teams use Pirical to research the talent market, build & maintain candidate lists, collect competitor intelligence, and strengthen market knowledge. 

As a result, direct sourcing has become the default, with the firm's agency reliance flipping from an 80/20 to 20/80 split in many cases.

"The working relationship with Pirical has been positive", Liz said, "there's a massive drive for us to do more direct recruitment, and to do that we need the tools. Pirical is certainly a critical tool in our armoury".

“Every role that we recruit for will use Pirical at some point."

Matthew Cowan

Recruitment Manager,

Clyde & Co

Essential data for lateral recruitment and strategic growth

Global attorney database built with the most comprehensive sources of data on the market. Designed for law firm lateral hiring teams, legal headhunters and strategy planners, our data tracks over 695,000 profiles across 130+ countries. PLP enables firms to source talent quicker, leverage their own network for referral opportunities, map out competitors’ org structures, research new markets and much more.