Ellen founded Marchetti & Co in 2016 after nine years recruiting for the professions, first in legal search and then across accountancy and consulting. The company places senior partners, practice leaders and executive committees into law firms, accountancy practices and consultancies, and advises on partner-level succession.
Ten people in London. Ellen holds the Professional Services chair in the first volume of The Executive Search Ten.
Support. It’s boring but it’s true. Nobody succeeds in a role where the person above them has quietly decided they were the wrong hire in month two and has stopped defending them internally.
In partnerships this is doubled: a lateral partner without a sponsor is an expensive guest. I now spend as long qualifying the sponsor as the candidate.
The professions bill time, and the machines are eating the billable hour from the bottom. The people I place are having to answer a question they have deferred for twenty years: what exactly are we charging for?
The leaders who thrive are relaxed about that question. The ones who are frightened of it are frightened because the honest answer was already thin.
Consensus-building, as the professions practise it. In a partnership it too often means an absence of decisions, elevated to a leadership style.
Every failing firm I have worked with was led by somebody everyone liked. The turnarounds were led by somebody a third of the partners voted against.
In partnerships, fit is the assessment, because a partner cannot be managed, only persuaded. Someone who cannot work the room will fail regardless of their book of business.
The discipline is writing down what the room actually requires. Left unwritten, fit quietly becomes “reminds the committee of themselves”, and the committee is sixty-one years old.
A managing partner who can lead people who can leave. The old firms held people with the ladder; the ladder is gone, the best associates have offers everywhere, and leadership is suddenly an actual skill rather than a seniority prize.
They elect the best rainmaker, then act astonished that the firm’s best biller makes a reluctant chief executive. Electing leaders by revenue is like choosing a pilot by ticket sales. The firms that broke that habit are pulling away.
It is rational within a closed room. The professions price people by reference to each other, and the room rarely checks its numbers against the world outside. Hence the periodic shock when a general counsel role pays more than the partnership.
When the firm has already decided and wants a process for the file. Governance theatre, and partnerships are addicted to it. We decline; the file does not need us, and the candidates deserve better than being extras.
The professions changed at entry and stalled at equity. The trainee intake looks like the country; the equity partnership looks like the country club. Twenty years was long enough for the pipeline excuse to expire: the people came in, and the model wore them out.
Fifty-fifty, and in partnerships the institution half is heavier: the same partner thrives in a firm that manages conflict openly and shrivels in one that manages it by email. I have re-placed the same person into both and watched it happen.
A knowledge lawyer for a firm leadership role, when every rival candidate ran a practice. The committee said she had never had clients. She had something better: every partner owed her, and none of them feared her.
She has run the firm for six years now.
“What do your clients complain about that your partners never hear?”
Because I hear it, constantly, and it would genuinely change how firms are led. The complaints are never about the law. They are about being handed down, being surprised by a bill, and being loved in the pitch and forgotten in the matter.
Asked at every sitting, answered without thinking too hard.