ALB Employers of Choice 2010

A record number of votes have been cast, with the data weighted, collated and tallied. Here is ALB’s definitive guide to the region’s best law firms to work for

 All the empirical data suggests that the legal employment markets across the region are slowly but surely recovering. Q4 2009 was marked by an improvement in employer sentiment, which in turn yielded an increase in the number of job postings in most jurisdictions across the region, despite the traditionally quiet Christmas break.

Many recruiters, HR managers and lawyers themselves have said that 2010 will be the year in which law firms and in-house legal departments lift their self-imposed embargoes on hiring. By the middle of this year “law firms and in-house departments will be actively looking for candidates again …by this time, demand should equal supply or be very close,” said one respondent. Full-service law firms and in-house teams will be looking to bring extra hands on board to help with the expected increase in areas aligned to economic improvement (corporate, banking and M&A), while specialist law firms will also be looking to lure disenchanted lawyers from their larger rivals.

Yes, legal employment markets in Asia and the Gulf will pick up (few predict a return to the heady days of 2007 when firms seemingly hired with reckless abandon and sought-after candidates could realistically expect to pen the terms of their employment), but just by how much remains uncertain.
Rob Green, the Asia-Pacific managing director of CML Recruitment, says that the first cabs off the rank could be employers who over-reacted to the financial crisis. “Firms that have made too many redundancies may be thinking about bringing in one or two people to help out overworked teams,” he says. Based on his conversations with Hong Kong-based law firms, Green also reckons that many are putting in place plans to increase their market share, which means increased recruitment. But just how willing are lawyers to return to firms whose reputations have been tarnished by their handling of the HR issues arising out of the financial crisis?

Just as longstanding economic paradigms have been smashed by the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, so too have the attitudes of lawyers across the region changed dramatically. Somewhat ironically, an employment market where the number of vacancies is dwarfed by the number of candidates has not proved enough to dissuade lawyers from being more selective in their choice of employer.

And it’s usually the law firms that have best dealt with these changes in the mindset of lawyers that have been voted as Employers of Choice for 2010.

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