Axiom is known for providing flexible legal talent to a wide array of in-house legal departments to help them fill staffing gaps and complete a variety of projects.

For example, an Axiom lawyer can support an existing in-house team on either a full-time or part-time basis amid a busy season within certain transactional or litigation practice areas.

However, the alternative legal services provider has not helped legal departments fill permanent positions on their teams even though clients have often asked if they could also assist in that way, according to Sara Morgan, Axiom’s chief talent officer for legal talent.

But in a season in which Axiom has embraced greater innovation, including by launching its own subsidiary law firm, the company has announced it will start helping legal departments fill permanent positions.

Morgan said Axiom’s permanent placement solution responds to client demand and builds off the talent platform’s existing strengths in identifying talent for specific legal roles.

“It's really just a natural extension of what we've been doing for years,” Morgan told Legal Dive.

Benefits for legal departments

Axiom officials said the company believes it will be able to help legal departments fill their open positions more quickly and cost-effectively than the existing processes they have in place.

In terms of speed, Axiom highlights that it has a network of thousands of attorneys across 14 practice areas from which to source potential hires for a legal department. 

On the quality front, Axiom reports that a high percentage of its clients say that the company’s legal talent is “as talented or even better than their counterparts at traditional law firms.”

“We know how to spot that quality and do it in an efficient and effective way, so it's an opportunity to continue to expand on that,” said Leslie Diorio, Axiom’s vice president of talent recruiting.

Morgan said she is optimistic that Axiom’s permanent placement solution will help address a common hiring pain point for legal departments. 

In speaking with clients in recent months, Morgan said many of them expressed that their internal HR teams or outside recruitment agencies struggle to understand what the internal legal team needs in candidates. This can cause delays in the hiring process and frustration for legal department leaders.

“We will be able to give a slate of candidates that I think will be much nearer the mark in a much quicker timeframe,” Morgan said.

At the start, Axiom’s permanent placement solution will be available to existing company clients who have open roles for lawyers or legal operations professionals.

Morgan and Diorio said they expect the new offering to be of interest across industries and different-sized legal departments.

Talent impact

The Axiom officials also said that the permanent placement solution should provide benefits to the company’s bench of legal talent.

Diorio said she is excited that Axiom’s network of attorneys will now have the opportunity to seek Axiom’s help being placed in permanent roles.

“It's giving more options and more choice to the legal talent that we identify,” she said.

Additionally, the company is publicly promoting an interim-to-perm solution in which a client can test out an Axiom legal professional on a short-term basis and move them to a permanent position at the end of the initial contract period if the fit is a good one. This offering benefits the participating legal professionals as well, according to Morgan.

“It gives the talent a chance to test things out, see whether they like it or not, and then take that move,” she said.

Overall, Diorio expressed confidence that the increased offerings for legal talent will help Axiom grow its network in the months to come. 

She said this expansion will assist the company in further achieving its objective of serving as a legal department’s “one-stop-shop for getting the outstanding talent they need, when and where they need it, to achieve their goals.”