How This Diversity-Minded Talent Startup Took a Hit, Then Thrived Amid Covid
When the pandemic hit, firms backed away from discussions about hiring early-career lawyers on a contract basis from Legal Innovators. But the pipeline is now flowing.
By Dan Packel | November 19, 2021 | Read the full article here.
Longtime Shearman & Sterling international arbitration attorney Jonathan Greenblatt and veteran technology and services CEO Bryan Parker had no idea they would be launching a startup that aimed to upend the traditional law firm hiring model just months before the COVID-19 pandemic destabilized virtually everything about how firms operate.
But two years after welcoming the first class of law clerks, Legal Innovators finds its early-career attorneys in demand at firms like Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe and Latham & Watkins, as well as in-house departments including construction giant Bechtel. For firms, it’s not just the pinched talent market that’s pushing them to experiment with new approaches to talent acquisition, but also the company’s strategy for delivering diverse talent, particularly in the wake of the nationwide reckoning on racial inequality that exploded in the summer of 2020.
“The pandemic and the tragedy of George Floyd accelerated some of the change that was coming anyway in the law firm business model, and there’s now greater willingness on the part of law firms to try different things than they had in place before,” Greenblatt said.
The company works to hire, mentor, and train a pool of young attorneys selected from a growing group of law schools and offer them to firms and corporate law departments on a contract basis. For firms, the proposition is that Legal Innovators can provide capable early-career lawyers ata more affordable price point, while for lawyers who may have struck out in the traditional Big Law hiring pipeline, there’s the prospect of ultimately securing a full-time associate position.
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