Legal Commentary

Martha Fay Africa, a former member of LTN's Editorial Advisory Board, has boomeranged right back to the legal headhunting firm that bears her name. I'll turn it over to my colleagues, reporter Niraj Chokshi and photograph Jason Doiy, at The Recorder:

After leaving almost exactly one year ago, recruiter Martha Fay "Marty" Africa has returned to the legal search firm that bears her name.



Africa, who will regain her managing director title, returned to Major, Lindsey & Africa on May 8, though the firm only announced it in a press release Wednesday. Africa, who had spent the past year with Hodge Niederer Cariani Lindsay, a small executive search firm in San Francisco, said she returned after Roland Dumas, a good friend and colleague at Major, Lindsey, asked her to come back.



"We missed her desperately," Dumas said. "Marty's contribution is passion."

"It felt like a really genuine reaching out," Africa said, "and I felt I should really think about this."



Africa, who had spent 24 years with the firm by the time she left last May, was the first recruiter to join Robert Major in the 1980s. By the time she left last year, it had about 110 recruiters.



"It was never sort of my career goal to be part of a large organization," she told The Recorder last year. She left because she felt she was better suited "to a smaller boutique situation," she said then.



Now Major, Lindsey has about 150 recruiters and more than 20 offices, according to its Web site, which describes it as the world's largest legal search firm.



Hodge Niederer, in contrast, now boasts 20 partners and associates on its Web site.



"I was ambivalent about the [Major, Lindsey firm's] growth," Africa said Wednesday, "because for me growth meant you didn't have people that you know as well . . . working in the firm."



But, after spending some time away from the lawyers and the firm where she has built her career, she had a change of heart. As for her prior concerns about growth, she said, "I've learned to relax a whole lot about that."



And while she had cashed in her partnership years before leaving Major, Lindsey in 2007, she said Wednesday she's considering buying back in. "I don't see any need to be a partner, but I think the firm would like me to be a partner."



Some legal recruiters at other firms say it can be tough to transition out of the legal search field.



"It's very difficult to go from a farmer to a fisherman," said L. William Nason, of Watanabe Nason Schwartz & Lippman in San Diego.



"I take my hat off to her for taking the challenge," he added. "The difficulty is unimaginable."



Valerie Fontaine, of Seltzer Fontaine Beckwith in Los Angeles, said that the differences between executive and legal search drove her and her partners to spin their firm out of a larger corporate recruiting firm where they had worked.



"What we did as legal recruiters was very different from what corporate recruiters were doing," she said.



Also, the competition is different. They found themselves up against "tens" of local legal recruiters, while the corporate search folks were facing half a dozen national competitors, she said. "You have to approach it differently."



Africa said her transition to an executive search firm, while not without its wrinkles, hadn't been very difficult, because prior to that at Major, Lindsey she'd been working on retained in-house placement, matching up corporations with legal executives.



At the Hodge firm, she said, she placed people for various positions, including vice presidents of human resources, chief financial officers and chief compliance officers.