Reinventing Professionals: Best Practices for Hiring Legal Executives
On this episode of Reinventing Professionals, Ari Kaplan speaks with Jonathan Friedman, founder and managing partner of Friedman Williams, a specialized recruiting firm serving law firms and corporate organizations across legal, finance, HR, marketing, IT, and administrative staffing.
Jonathan, who has worked in staffing and recruiting since 1997 and founded Friedman Williams in 2003, explains how the role of the law firm C-suite has changed. Where firm leadership once viewed operations, finance, technology, HR, and marketing leaders as a cost to the business, those executives are now central to revenue and growth. Partners are excellent at practicing law, he notes, but a firm that treats its business leaders as overhead puts itself on the wrong side of growth.
The conversation covers:
- How AI, cloud technology, and security have raised the stakes for law firm leaders, and why embracing innovation is about adding value, not replacing people
- Why partner recruiting is fundamentally a sales exercise, and why many firms struggle to explain what makes them different from the firm down the hall
- The difference between a recruiter and a headhunter, and how proactive outreach reaches passive candidates who never apply to job postings
- Why money is rarely the deciding factor for senior candidates, and how relationships uncover what truly motivates a move
- The leadership trait Jonathan values most: building a team that can succeed without you
- How a rushed or misaligned executive hire can damage culture, drive away valued people, and set a firm back years
