Robert here. Loyal readers of our blog will have noticed that I tend to remain in the background here. The truth is that Robert really is an outstanding recruiter, and I prefer to have him out in front of our associate recruitment efforts in Asia. After seven years of recruiting, four years in Asia, my recruiting interest is primarily in assisting partners. My practice dovetails with that of Robert and our other recruiters since satisfied partners continue to have needs at the associate level for many years after we place them and they tend to hire us to fill those needs. Luckily for us, we’ve been involved in more than our share of partner recruitment successes. I’m very proud of what we have done in Asia but I’m happy to have Robert doing most of the direct work with associates.
It seems to me that as a sort of diversion from our usual intense focus in this column on matters that pertain to associate candidates’ immediate interests, some of you actually still want to be partner in a law firm and might benefit from knowing a few things about the process before arriving. Who makes partner at firms in Asia compared to US counterparts, for example? Are your chances better or worse as a result of moving to Asia? And what will the future be for those who succumb to the allure of an Asian career and actually “succeed” in a law firm by becoming partner?
Before going on, I’d like to make a few comments about my philosophy on recruiting, which I know is shared by Robert and I believe is shared by all the recruiters who work at Kinney Recruiting. Simply put, we try hard to be short on bullshit and long on transparency. We would rather forego a placement today than make that placement by convincing you to join an employer who is not right for you. This is why we refuse to accept retained or exclusive recruiting contracts from law firms – we have to be able to credibly be your honest broker for an effective job search. Retainers and exclusives lead to bias or the appearance of bias, which is just as bad. Some of our client firms would like us to be biased in their favor, but we really think we do all of them a greater service by letting our candidates decide what to do with the greatest amount of available information.
So with that preface, what are your prospects for long term career advancement if you make the jump to Asia? How can you divine what your chances are? What are some examples of the types of people who have pulled it off? What rules apply to me if I’m thinking of my chances to make partner in Asia?
You already know that the chances of making partner at a top firm are statistically slim for everyone, regardless of location. Those chances are especially slim statistically in Asia for a couple of reasons. First, looking back over the last five years, there has continued to be a healthy amount of rotational moving to Asia, whether official or unofficial. In other words, people are still moving to Asia with the intent to return to the US or the UK after a few years. This is starting to change, but the upshot of the rotations is to increase turnover and skew the statistics. Secondly, despite the growth in Asia, the profitability of the offices in the region has not been high enough historically to justify partner elevations at the same rate as the most robust home offices of the same firms. I can still remember a visit to a partner’s office in Hong Kong in 2004 with him lamenting that, with the poor results of the prior year (due to SARS), there was a prospect that he’d be sent home. Things have looked up more recently for that guy and others (for the time being anyway), but this brings me to my first rule of partnership chances.
Partner Rule Number One: Unless you are in an office or practice group (or, depending on the organization of the firm, both) whose profitability significantly exceeds the average for the overall firm, you will NOT make partner unless one of the following is true: a) you
are seen to have the demonstrated potential with a reasonable certainty to bring in enough new business to more than compensate for your addition to partner headcount; or b) you have already brought or handled substantial business for the firm such that the partners believe you would carry those relationships out of the firm if you were to leave. Bottom line: when an office is not profitable, it does not make partners who do not bring new business.
Beyond the statistics, I believe that the sort of people who are partners in these firms fall into specific categories. Next week I will describe these categories and give examples of the specific types of people who are partners we know in Hong Kong/China/Tokyo offices of major law firms. I won’t name any of the people I’m describing, but some of them might recognize themselves and the readers of these chronicles might find it edifying to imagine whether they could fit in one or more of the categories of people we discuss.
