We spoke to James Charlton, CFO & COO at SSQ about how his team uses Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) to research the candidate market and build stronger relationships with their clients.

SSQ is a legal search and recruitment agency, working with some of the world’s leading law firms and brands. The company has placed Partners, Associates, and other legal roles into firms and in-house teams all over the world, including a number of high profile team moves and office launches.

Candidate research is +25% faster

The team used to manually collate market data, now they have up-to-date information at the click of a button and a much faster research workflow.

The Challenge

Prior to adopting Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP), SSQ maintained a CRM with all their candidate data. This process required members of the team manually scraping individual lawyers' information from websites and other sources to add or update existing data.

Understandably, the process became difficult to manage and very time consuming, plus the data was full of holes so wasn’t fully trusted.

Around 2017, the leadership team at SSQ felt that their "CRM days were over", aware that there were tools out there that could provide the data they needed more easily. "Having a searchable database with all the law firm & candidate data in one place was more efficient than having to input it all yourself," James pointed out. After initially using a different provider, SSQ upgraded to PLP in 2018.

"Over the last 7 years, having access to Pirical has made our research process at least +25% faster than it used to be, and with a leaner team.

The old process was a lot more manual and required more resources to keep our information up-to-date. Now the team can just log into Pirical, perform a quick search and be confident that the data is accurate and reliable. Having a more complete data set that's quicker to access has resulted in some major efficiency gains."

James Charlton

CFO & COO, SSQ

The Solution

A reliable source of data that speeds up candidate research

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) provides SSQ's Research and Consulting teams with quick access to the data they need to find candidates and the ability to easily save them to a shareable list.

“In the past, we used to try and compile all that information ourselves but the data was full of holes. So now we can use the information on Pirical and know it’s trustworthy," James said.



No more trawling through German law websites and copies of The Lawyer for the latest candidate information!

More complete market data that helps strengthen client relationships

The breadth of data available on PLP has also helped SSQ strengthen relationships with their clients.

When speaking with key decision makers at elite global firms the team can share insights & market trends, as well as candidate shortlists for a particular role, to build the confidence and trust that's vital to bolstering that relationship.

"It means we can act like a partner with our clients and help them with their strategy and decision making.”

The Result

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) as an integral part of the team's workflow

Pirical Legal Professionals (PLP) is now a key part of the teams' daily workflow and the primary tool when researching the talent market. The CRM, which used to be the core source of information, is now the 3rd or 4th product they turn to. The numbers don't lie, in the first 6 months of 2025 the SSQ team has run over 80,000 searches!

The team can quickly perform searches and easily save relevant candidates to lists. The Moves section has also proved useful for mapping who has moved where, including lawyer moves outside of the UK.

All in all, SSQ can now easily access the data they need on a daily basis, knowing that the information provided is trustworthy and reliable. The efficiency gains have left more time to find the right candidates, make high value placements, and build stronger relationships with key clients.

“The Research team always has Pirical open on a tab."

James Charlton

CFO & COO, SSQ

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 660,000 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.