After servicing the Sydney legal recruitment market remotely for nearly ten years, last week Burgess Paluch Legal Recruitment opened a dedicated Sydney office, snaring senior legal recruiter Kirsty McNay to establish the business.
A successful senior legal recruiter, McNay’s background includes recruiting and leading a team in both the Sydney legal market and her home country of New Zealand. She has also recruited Australian lawyers for overseas jurisdictions such as London, Hong Kong and the Channel Islands. Doron Paluch described the fit for the business as both perfect in terms of McNay’s background and recruitment style, as well as perfect timing given the recent return to form of the Sydney market. Paluch said “we have had a watchful eye on strong specialist legal recruiters in Sydney and have been considering a move into the market seriously since it began to improve 12 months ago. Kirsty represents a fantastic fit for us and we are confident she will succeed.”
While Burgess Paluch already services a broad range of law firm, in-house and government clients, with senior recruiter Jackie Gillies and Paul Burgess dealing with an established base of clients, Kirsty’s contacts and skills are expected to raise the profile of the brand in the largest legal market in Australia. Director Paul Burgess said “Kirsty also has a level of maturity and understanding about what human resources managers and partners are seeking in their senior lawyers. She looks at recruitment as a long term relationship business, rather than a series of transactions. We will differentiate ourselves markedly from those local recruiters who take a short term approach.” The business works with both senior and junior lawyers across Australia, and has a strong track record in assisting with partner moves and firm mergers, an area in which McNay has a shared interest.
While it is early days for the Sydney arm of the business, the Sydney legal market has shown strong improvement over the last 12 months. Areas such as Banking & Finance, Corporate and Commercial have shown significant improvement. More significantly though, the largest law firms are finally returning to the market to recruit in some force, after a relatively slow 3 years. While general sentiments remain high in Sydney, and data shows strong financial improvement in the Sydney economy, there is still a relatively low level of demand across the market compared to pre-GFC highs. The key difference in the market appears to be the improvement in the volume of corporate transactions causing demand to grow steadily in front-end areas such as finance and corporate. So, while the Sydney market is much improved, the good news is that there is still substantial room for the market to continue to rebound.