Intellectual Property

3 Questions For An IP Associate Turned Legal Recruiting Entrepreneur (Part I)

It's difficult for firms to add much-needed associate help in a timely manner, especially outside of the established summer and first-year associate programs.

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intellectual property law

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One of my favorite ways to participate in my Biglaw firm when I was an associate was to help out the recruiting team. Whether it was interviewing prospective associates or summers or acting as a summer associate mentor, there was something invigorating about working with lawyers looking for a new professional home. At the same time, it was hard not to notice how difficult it was for firms to add much-needed associate help in a timely manner, especially outside of the established summer and first-year associate programs. This week, you will hear from a former Biglaw associate who has decided to try to tackle the problem of timely associate hiring for top-tier law firms. My interviewee, Albert Tawil, is a former IP/tech transactions associate at Cleary Gottlieb and Fenwick & West and received his J.D. from NYU Law in 2017. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and daughter.

Albert founded Lateral Hub, a job board for lateral candidates and top-tier law firms, in December 2021, inspired by his experience lateraling as a junior associate and helping dozens of former colleagues and friends with their lateral searches. In his spare time during his “day” job as a Biglaw associate, Albert researched and developed the Lateral Hub concept over the span of a year, which included speaking with countless associates, hiring partners, and recruiting managers and directors. He decided to finally launch Lateral Hub as a much-needed change in the legal recruiting industry for both firms and attorneys. Lateral Hub’s Job Board is now live with over 20 top-tier firms and 120-plus lateral openings around the country.

Albert is now working full-time as the founder and CEO of Lateral Hub to make the world of legal recruiting a better place for attorneys and law firms. He frequently shares his thoughts on legal recruiting and law firm life on his LinkedIn feed. In addition to Albert, Lateral Hub is supported by external marketing and web development teams.

Now to the interview. As usual, I have added some brief commentary to Albert’s answer below but have otherwise presented his answer to my first question as he provided it.

Gaston Kroub: What makes Lateral Hub useful for firms and attorneys looking to lateral?

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Albert Tawil: Lateral Hub is a simple concept: it is a job board for lateral candidates and top-tier law firms. Law firms sign up to post their lateral openings and candidates can easily browse, filter, and apply for jobs directly without leaving the site and without any payment or account/profile required. We work directly with our member firms and do not scrape job data from firm websites without consent.

What makes Lateral Hub useful for attorneys is that it provides information directly to lateral candidates regarding which firms are hiring. Before Lateral Hub, it was very difficult for a lateral candidate to discover who is hiring, for example, it required visiting firm, website by website, spending hours on research for potential firms, or speaking with friends or other network contacts. And many candidates have expressed frustration that tools like LinkedIn are not focused enough on the types of firms they are interested in and therefore not worth the time.

For law firms, Lateral Hub is useful in multiple ways.

First, firms can save a lot of money by hiring more candidates directly. Law firms have told me across the board that they have little success sourcing applicants through the firm website and primarily rely on recruiters to hire lateral associates, which is very expensive. This is not surprising, as lateral candidates do not have the time nor the desire to visit individual firm websites. Lateral Hub provides an additional source of direct applications for firms outside of the current process, which is more efficient and less expensive.

Second, firms can increase their brand awareness through Lateral Hub. Many top-tier firms, especially boutique and midsize firms, have mentioned this to me as one of the reasons that Lateral Hub is attractive to them: lateral candidates may not be aware of the firm as an option or that the firm has a department in their desired practice area. Lateral Hub provides these firms with a platform to get their name out to potential candidates.

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GK: As an IP litigator, I am very familiar with the way that a solid — and of course very welcome — run of cases can quickly stretch a firm’s associate resources to the breaking point. At the same time, it is unrealistic to imagine that the quality IP associates, namely the busy and skilled ones, that a busy firm would want to attract on short notice are somehow keeping real-time tabs on how different IP groups on their location are performing. Without that awareness, the chances of getting a busy IP associate to even apply to an open position become near-zero very quickly. Recruiters, of course, perform a very valuable service for both firms and lawyers by first identifying the most promising lateral candidates and then proactively alerting them to lateral opportunities. But it can’t hurt for firms that have needs to let the associate candidate pool know that lateral opportunities exist, in addition to leaning on their existing recruiter contacts to deliver worthy lawyers for consideration.

Moreover, considering the prevalence of high-quality boutiques in the IP area, many of which compete directly with the most prestigious and largest of Biglaw firms for top-shelf IP work, a tool like Lateral Hub could be very helpful. First, it may not be so obvious to younger associates at Biglaw firms that IP boutiques can be very viable options, without the need to sacrifice prestige, level of work, or quality of training. To the extent Lateral Hub increases visibility for IP boutiques to strong associate talent, all the better on both ends. Second, because IP boutiques can get very busy very fast, but often don’t have the same depth of internal recruiting resources — or broad recruiter relationships, for that matter — the need for immediate associate help can become very acute even as options to reach potential candidates is limited. A tool like Lateral Hub, therefore, could be a welcome additional avenue for IP boutiques in particular to attract lateral associate interest.

Next week, Albert will discuss how his experiences as a Biglaw associate helped shape Lateral Hub’s founding offerings, as well as why he believes law firms can take advantage of Lateral Hub’s listings without disturbing their recruiter relationships.

Please feel free to send comments or questions to me at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or via Twitter: @gkroub. Any topic suggestions or thoughts are most welcome.

Gaston Kroub lives in Brooklyn and is a founding partner of Kroub, Silbersher & Kolmykov PLLC, an intellectual property litigation boutique, and Markman Advisors LLC, a leading consultancy on patent issues for the investment community. Gaston’s practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and related counseling, with a strong focus on patent matters. You can reach him at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or follow him on Twitter: @gkroub.

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