AI-Powered Legal Recruitment: Revolutionize Your Law Firm With haistack.ai

Haistack – Law Firm, developed by Michael Heise, in partnership with Lateral Link, greatly simplifies and enhances the process of sourcing candidates for attorney roles. It also helps firms identify which of their current lawyers are likely to be in high demand in the lateral marketplace, enabling more targeted retention efforts.

Making recruiting and retention more efficient and effective

Traditional mechanisms for sourcing lateral candidates are laborious and slow. Recruiters typically conduct LinkedIn keyword searches and ask contacts in their network to suggest potential candidates. Haistack – Law Firm replaces a process that often takes a couple of weeks with one that requires only a couple of clicks. Firms can manually add jobs, that are not posted publicly, and our AI takes minutes to return a list of best candidates not only for the job but for the firm also. This process would normally take days.

Haistack – Law Firm uses machine learning to identify the best candidates for a specific attorney role. The tool aggregates publicly available attorney, firm, and law firm job data from across the internet and enriches it with proprietary Lateral Link data. The goal is not merely to find candidates who have the necessary seniority in the relevant practice area and geographic market. Rather, Haistack – Law Firm also identifies those likely to be cultural fits by analyzing the profiles of a firm’s current attorneys and highlighting similarities between that current pool and a potential candidate. Where did the candidate go to law school? Did they write for a journal? Did they graduate with honors? Haistack – Law Firm considers factors like these and illustrates specific connections between a candidate and a firm. When recruiters or hiring partners review the Haistack – Law Firm output, they are presented with the estimated strength of fit for each identified candidate and the logic underlying that determination. All these characteristics are badged on a candidate profile and seen by the users of Haistack – Law Firm.

Based on the connections that Haistack – Law Firm highlights, strategies for contacting high-potential candidates who have not yet applied are immediately apparent. A recruiter can turn to a current lawyer at the firm who is connected to a potential candidate both to validate the prediction of a strong match and to help reach out to the candidate and sell them on the role. Not only does Haistack – Law Firm reduce the time to identify candidates, but it also makes the process of cultivating them more efficient and effective.

Haistack – Law firm provides an additional source of insight to assist with retention. Given the tool’s ability to identify external lawyers who would be strong lateral candidates, it equally can determine which members of a firm’s current attorney pool are a likely flight risk, based on compatibility between their profiles and opportunities in the wider marketplace. This early warning will prompt firms to evaluate how much they value at-risk talent, while there is still time for affirmative steps to retain critical team members who are in high demand.

Shorter time to fill vacancies = less foregone profit

Filling vacant attorney roles efficiently makes a substantial difference to a law firm’s profits. As we have previously explored, a single sixth-year associate slot left vacant for 30 days could cost $117,329 in lost profits. The estimated loss escalates to $351,986 if the vacancy remains open for 90 days. With figures like these at stake, the business case for investing in a more efficient recruiting process is obvious.

85% of roles for which Lateral Link is the recruiter are filled within 60 days. With the help of Haistack – Law Firm, we estimate that we can reduce the expected time to fill from 60 days to 50. In the case of a sixth-year associate, this equates to a savings of $39,110.

Let’s imagine a firm with two vacancies: one for a sixth-year associate and another for a fifth-year associate. If we assume that Haistack – Law Firm helps fill these vacancies in 10 days less time than would otherwise be required, the firm will achieve savings of $39,110 (sixth-year) + $37,774 (fifth-year) = $76,884. That savings exceeds the cost of a Haistack – Law firm subscription ($75,000 for up to 5 users).

For law firms, time really is money. Traditional recruitment processes just don’t cut it—especially when your competitors have embraced more sophisticated alternatives. Haistack – Law Firm is the new way to recruit: swift, precise, and effective. Is your firm ready to operate at the forefront of recruitment innovation?