Where do law firms find employment attorneys?

Hold one decision while you read: the side of the docket you are hiring for — the plaintiff-or-management fork that the first section of how to hire an employment attorney walks through.

Every pool below splits along it.

A decade on the plaintiff side and a decade on the management side are different resumes, even when the job title is identical.

Government enforcement is the first pool.

Three federal statutes in this practice, which the EEOC enforces — Title VII, the ADA and GINA — cover private employers with 15 or more employees who worked at least 20 calendar weeks in the current or prior year.

The attorneys at the EEOC and at state civil-rights agencies are the lawyers in this pool.

The plaintiff-side pool has a named institution: NELA — the National Employment Lawyers Association — an association of plaintiff-side workers' rights attorneys.

An association defined by its members' side of the docket is a natural starting point for a plaintiff-side search, and it runs a job board of its own — more on the board, and its one open question, below.

The management-side pool has no single label.

It is the lawyers who advise and defend employers on the same statutes — at defense-side firms and in the employment groups of general-practice firms — and lawyers organize around it: ask whether your state bar has a labor and employment section, because if it does, the events and member directory it runs put you in the room with management-side lawyers in your market.

The fourth pool is labor unions' counsel offices — lawyers who work for unions rather than for employers, which is why this pool belongs on the short list for plaintiff-side seats and worker-facing practices.

Which pool to work first follows the seat: a plaintiff-side opening points at the NELA community and enforcement-office alumni; a management-side opening at defense-side lawyers and the same agencies' alumni.

Agency alumni sit on both lists — one more reason not to screen agency experience out when it shows up on a resume.

For a plaintiff-side opening, one role-specific board is verified: NELA runs a NELA Job Board on its site.

One unknown matters before you build a search around it — the NELA site we read does not say whether an employer must be a member to post, so confirm posting access and terms with NELA directly before you commit the search to it.

On the management side, our research verified no employment-specific job board, so reach that pool through its communities instead: your state bar's labor and employment section, and the defense and management-side organizations active in your market.

Events and committee seats do for passive candidates what boards do for active ones — they put you in the room with the lawyers who are not browsing postings.

For the general posting menu — general boards versus legal-specific ones, and what a paid posting buys — the decision belongs to where to post law firm jobs.

This page stays on the channels unique to the role; what the cross-role guide covers, it covers for every practice area at once.

Outsource the search when it is confidential, when the seat is senior enough that discretion protects both sides, or when the market is thin enough that mapping it yourself costs more partner time than the fee costs the firm.

Those are judgments about your own search.

What you can check from the outside is the firm's standard of conduct.

The National Association of Legal Search Consultants (NALSC) is where that diligence starts: its members subscribe to a Code of Ethics as a condition of membership, so a NALSC member comes with a written standard you can hold it to.

Two clauses of that code shape your search directly.

A member firm may not solicit any attorney from an office where it made a placement for six months after that placement, unless the firm and the employer agree otherwise — so offices a recruiter has just placed into are off-limits to it, which protects your firm after a placement and limits where an active recruiter can look for you.

And a member firm may not go after a candidate it placed while that candidate stays with the employer that paid the fee.

The consent clause governs what reaches your desk: candidates may be submitted to employers only with the candidate's express prior consent, and only with the employer's prior authorization — or a reasonable belief, from prior direct contact, that the employer would accept it.

A resume that arrives with neither your authorization nor prior direct contact behind it is not how a member firm works, and neither is submitting a candidate who never consented to the submission.

Treat either as a diligence question about the firm that did it.

On money: fees are negotiated, and our research found no primary source for a standard contingency percentage on attorney placements — treat any quoted market rate as an opening position, and get the fee, the guarantee terms and any temp-to-permanent conversion terms in writing before you sign.

The working mechanics are in working with legal recruiters and legal recruiter fees.

When what you need is interim coverage rather than a permanent seat — a leave, a docket spike, a matter that outgrew the bench you have — legal staffing agencies are the tool built for it.

A passive candidate is, by definition, employed elsewhere and not looking — which is why a posting alone does not reach them.

Reaching them runs on three things: visibility in the communities above, referrals, and a direct approach that respects the job they already have.

Referrals work, and the EEOC attaches a guardrail to them: recruiting only by word of mouth from a workforce that is mostly one group may violate the law if the result is that almost all of your new hires come from that group.

The more homogeneous your current team and the more referral-driven your pipeline, the more deliberately you should widen it — post the role publicly even while you work your contacts, and source from more than one of the pools above.

Visibility compounds slowly, so start it before the seat exists: if your state bar's employment section runs CLE panels, teach one; take the committee seat; write where employment lawyers on your side of the docket actually read.

The point is not name recognition for its own sake — when a passive candidate starts taking calls, your firm is already a known quantity on their side of the practice.

The direct approach is short and specific: name the seat, the side and the mix; say what in their record prompted the call; and hand them control of the pace — an interested lawyer manages their own confidentiality from there, and a no handled gracefully keeps next year's call open.

Pitch the seat, not the market: the trial docket, the case mix, the platform, the path.

Which is one more reason the posting — the next section — has to say those things out loud.

A posting for this role sorts applicants by the decisions it states out loud: the side (plaintiff or management), the mix (advisory, litigation, or both), the case types, the years of practice you actually need, and the bar admission your firm requires — stated as your firm's requirement, for the state you are hiring in.

Write it for the lawyer with options: they read a vague posting as a firm that has not decided what it is hiring, and they keep reading somewhere else.

Then audit your own copy, because an employment law firm's own ad is a compliance exhibit its applicants are professionally equipped to read.

Per the EEOC, it is illegal to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for, or discourages applicants because of, race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information — and the EEOC's own example of a discouraging ad is one seeking "recent college graduates," which may discourage people over 40.

Read your draft for the same effect — phrasing that could signal a preferred age the way that example does.

Two mechanical notes finish the draft.

The EEOC also requires an employer to provide an accommodation a disabled applicant needs in order to apply — unless it causes significant difficulty or expense — and a line in the posting on how to request one is the practical version of that duty.

And the pay range belongs in the posting wherever your state's rule puts it there: in California, an employer with 15 or more employees must include the pay scale for the position in the job posting, and any employer there must provide the pay scale to an applicant on reasonable request.

Other states and cities may have their own posting rules — confirm the current rule for every state you hire in before you post.

For the general anatomy — structure, length, title, what belongs above the fold — the cross-role version is how to write a law firm job posting, and it is worth browsing employment attorney jobs to see how competing firms describe the same seat before you finalize yours.

When the copy is ready, the pools and boards above decide where it goes — and posting it here puts it in front of attorneys and legal staff on a board built only for legal jobs.

Employer information, not legal advice. The rules named on this page — the EEOC's advertising, recruiting and accommodation guidance and California's pay-scale posting statute — change; confirm the current rules for every state you hire in with your employment counsel, and any ethics question with your state bar's ethics counsel.