Adastrum is a London executive search and leadership advisory firm. We appoint the operational, technology and transformation leadership that runs a legal business: chief operating officers, chief information and technology officers, and the directors delivering change across a firm.
Law firms are governed differently from almost any other kind of organisation, and that difference decides which appointments hold and which quietly come undone.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentWe are retained by managing partners, executive boards and chief operating officers to appoint the business leadership of a legal practice. That is a different market from fee-earner hiring, with a different candidate pool, and it rewards a different kind of search: slower at the front end, where the brief is agreed, and far more careful about stakeholder dynamics all the way through.
A partnership is not a board. Equity partners are owners paying for the appointment out of their own drawings, each practice area behaves like its own business, and consent matters as much as authority. We manage that on both sides, because a candidate who does not understand it will not last, and a process that ignores it produces an appointment nobody owns.
The legal sector is absorbing more structural change at once than it has in a generation. The firms that retain us are usually holding several of these at the same time.
We are retained by law firms and legal businesses to appoint senior leadership, including
Our work is the leadership that runs and transforms a legal business. We do not place practising fee-earners, partners, solicitors, barristers or chartered legal executives, we do not work below director level, and we are not a contingent agency. If that is what you need, we will gladly point you to someone better placed to help.
Five stages, run the same way on every mandate, with the stakeholder work that a partnership specifically requires built into each one.
Stage 1
We establish what the appointment has to change and, just as importantly, who has to be brought with it. In a partnership that second question is not administrative. We identify early which practice groups will need convincing and what the appointment will cost the firm politically, because that is what a candidate is really being asked to take on.
Stage 2
We map inside legal and well beyond it. Some of the strongest leaders we have placed into firms built their judgement in other industries entirely and brought a perspective the sector had stopped generating for itself. We approach each one personally, and we are candid with them about the environment they would be joining.
Stage 3
Assessment is a subject-matter conversation, not a scripted competency exercise. For legal appointments we weight one thing heavily: how a candidate behaves when a decision has to be made without consensus. Every shortlisted candidate receives a written assessment covering track record, behaviour under pressure and the specific risks of appointing them into a partnership.
Stage 4
We present three to five candidates with our recommendation and the trade-offs between them. This is the stage where legal searches most often go wrong, because the pull towards the candidate who reassures the widest group of internal stakeholders is stronger here than anywhere else. We will say plainly when we think that is happening.
Stage 5
We manage the offer and stay close to the leader and the managing partner through the first hundred days. A leader who has never worked inside a partnership will meet its decision-making rhythm in the first month, and that is the moment where an otherwise good appointment is most likely to lose confidence.
We once advised an international firm appointing a chief technology officer to succeed a long-serving chief information officer who was about to be consumed by a major platform programme. Two candidates reached the final stage. We recommended the stronger of the two; the firm chose the other, largely to keep a group of internal stakeholders comfortable. That candidate accepted and then withdrew before starting. Because the original process had been managed carefully, the leader we had recommended was still willing to talk, took the role, and remains in it today.
The lesson has stayed with us, and it shapes how we assess. A CV tells you what a leader has done. It does not tell you how they will behave when a partner group pushes back or a decision has to be made without consensus. Working with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, we assess the behaviour a leader is likely to reach for under pressure, because in a partnership that is what determines whether an appointment holds.
We are not narrow legal-sector specialists, by design. A chief operating officer who has professionalised a services business elsewhere, or a technology leader who has delivered transformation under real commercial pressure, often sees the opportunity in a firm more clearly than someone who has only ever worked inside one.
Copying the competition rarely produces a breakthrough, and legal has been hiring from the same small pool for a long time. We map the market both inside and outside legal and let the problem decide where the right leader comes from. What we will not do is put forward someone who cannot read a partnership, whatever their record elsewhere.
Adastrum brings twenty years of appointing senior leaders into complex organisations, a behavioural assessment method developed with the social psychologist Dr Ian Stewart, and our Meta Team programme, which has worked with leadership teams at organisations including Nasdaq, Novartis, HSBC, Unilever and EQT.
No. We appoint the leadership that runs and transforms a legal business: chief operating officers, chief financial officers, chief information and technology officers, and transformation directors. We do not place practising fee-earners, partners or chartered legal executives at any level.
Before your next senior appointment, it is worth asking whether you are choosing the candidate who will keep the partnership comfortable or the leader who will actually move the firm forward. They are not always the same person.
If that is a conversation worth having, it is exactly the one we welcome.
Talk to us about a senior appointmentObservations from twenty years of appointing leaders into complex organisations: what separates an appointment that compounds from one that quietly comes apart, why succession plans drift towards the most visible candidate, and what a board ought to ask before it signs off the brief.
The Collaborator is the schema you appoint to make a divided organisation move as one. It is also the one most likely to keep seeking agreement long after the moment for agreement has gone. The most dangerous phrase in a senior team is not “I disagree.” It is “let’s get everyone aligned first.” I watched a leader run a good business into a wasted quarter on that phrase, and almost nobody in the room could see it happ
The most expensive senior appointment I have watched fail had the best roadmap I have ever seen. I mean that sincerely. It was a genuinely impressive piece of thinking. Every workstream mapped, every dependency identified, governance and sequencing and risk all accounted for. The board saw it in month three and applauded. He was still refining it in month fourteen, when they let him go.
The Commander is the schema you appoint in a crisis. It is also the one you have to watch once the crisis has passed. There is a phrase you hear in big organisations when nothing is moving. "It's just how things get done here." Say it out loud and it sounds like culture. Listen properly and it is something sharper. It means someone at the top is commanding, and everyone below has quietly learned to wait.
The board thought they had found the perfect CEO. Two successful exits. A scaled multinational division. References that read like a character witness: decisive, commercially sharp, a natural leader. In the interview he was confident, fluent, convincing on growth and culture and transformation. The appointment was unanimous. Twelve months later the same board was negotiating his exit. Revenue targets had been missed.
There’s one question almost every HR-led interview process insists on. “Tell me about a time you failed.” At junior level, it sometimes earns its keep. At C-suite, it’s a junk question. And it’s almost always the wrong thing to ask in the room. I’ll explain why I won’t ask it. And then I’ll tell you what I ask instead.
Most succession planning assumes someone is ready to step up. But what happens when the obvious successor is the one who leaves? A look at why heir apparent plans fail, the real cost of an unplanned leadership transition, and how boards build genuine continuity.
