Energized Recruiters
May 4, 2001

Larry and Lauren Prescott have carved a high-powered niche finding legal talent for corporate clients and law firms.

Boom times in the energy sector have always been prosperous periods for Lauren and Larry Prescott.

And right now, Houston's energy companies are keeping their firm, Prescott Legal Search, very busy indeed.

"Business couldn't be better," says Larry. Over the past few years, deregulation of gas and power has created "a whole new practice area for us," he says.

A frenzy of activity in power plant development, project financing and power trading has created a demand for attorneys with specialized expertise.

Hugh Rice Kelly, general counsel for Reliant Energy and a client of Prescott, says the need covers every area of expertise.

"We are looking for specialized lawyers with expertise in power generation, distribution and transmission, all areas of power and gas trading and regulatory affairs," says Kelly. "Prescott knows our requirements well and they have a good record of sending people to us that work out. The candidates we see are on target, and we have a pretty high record of hiring them."

Finding the right legal candidates for a corporate client or law firm is a whole different ball game from general executive recruiting.

In one case, the Prescotts referred to a prominent Dallas law firm a 4O-year-old partner with another top Dallas firm who had 15 years of practice experience and client cases worth $1.5 million.

The first question the managing partner at the Dallas firm asked Larry Prescott about the candidate was, "What was his GPA in law school?"

"I said, 'Are you kidding me?' " Larry recalls. The partner was dead serious.

"Law firms are extremely focused on how people did in law school," Larry says, while corporations looking for in-house attorneys or general counsel are not always so concerned about grade point averages.

The huge importance of law school grades is "the way it's always been," says Lauren Prescott.

"That's how they (law firm partners) were evaluated and it's embedded in their culture," she says. Beyond that, the whole hiring process in law firms is very different than it is for companies, Lauren says.

"Law firms are partnerships, which means a lot of people are involved in the decision," she explains. "It's a prolonged process. There is no finish date like there is with an executive search for a company."

Prescott Legal Search was founded 20 years ago when Larry saw a need for someone who understood both the practice of law and the legal culture, and could apply that experience to legal recruiting.

Following graduation from Baylor University Law School, Larry went to work for Tenneco and later served as general counsel of a NYSE corporation and an Amex company.

But after 12 years of corporate law, much of which he found "nitpicky," Larry decided he didn't want to practice law any more.

At the same time, he wanted to do something that would put his legal experience to work.

"I realized no one in Texas was doing legal recruiting who had practiced law," he says, "and everyone I talked to said 'Please do it. We need someone who understands the difference between tax law and litigation."

He started his business in November of 1981. Today, Prescott Legal Search employs 18 recruiters in the firm's Houston headquarters, including 13 attorney recruiters, all of them attorneys, and three of the five others are paralegals. The firm opened an office in Dallas in 1997 and Austin in 1998.

MORE LATERAL HIRING

In 1982, Larry was introduced to Lauren by a lawyer friend and the couple immediately "hit it off." They were married in 1984, and she joined the firm as his partner.

Lauren, a former TWA flight attendant, flew 747s on international routes out of New York for three years after college. When she found herself mentally calculating how many cups of coffee she served per flight, she decided it was time to do something else and she entered the University of Texas Law School.

She worked for Gulf Oil, Exxon and finally a boutique law firm practicing oil and gas law before joining Prescott.

Both Prescotts are native Texans. Larry, who grew up in Midland, one summer played on a Pony League baseball team with a kid named George W. Bush.

"That was a relationship I should have maintained," he chuckles. "That's something I should have done a whole lot differently."

"Maybe W. will invite the Pony League team to the White House sometime," laughs Lauren.

When Larry launched his business, few law firms used legal recruiters. They didn't hire experienced lawyers making lateral moves, recruiting strictly from law schools. Since then, the profession has gone through a "groundbreaking" process, he says.

"There has been a lot of growth and a lot of branch offices are being opened in Texas by out-of-state law firms," he says. "That has required a lot of lateral hiring."

With the economy on a long-running growth streak and local law firms losing people to new branch offices, the established law firms began using legal recruiters to bring in experienced people to fill positions.

"Early on, most of the recruiting was for associates. Later, firms began searching for partners, practice groups and merger candidates," Larry says. Much of the growth in law firm recruiting work has focused on intellectual practice attorneys, he says.

"Lawyers with electrical engineering or computer science degrees are difficult to dislodge. The demand way exceeds the supply," Larry notes.

Energy companies often want attorneys with mechanical or chemical engineering backgrounds, which are easier to find, he says.

The California energy crisis also has created a big demand for lawyers with expertise in power issues. The problem has been that energy company lawyers and executives have been spending so much time in California that they've had no time to meet with job candidates, Lauren says.

"We're lucky, though, because due to our market position we get a lot of exclusive work with clients," she says.

This means that Prescott is not competing with other search firms to get their candidates into interviews. "We do a lot of our work in person, rather than over the telephone," she says.

"Clients are often shocked that we want to meet with them because some legal recruiters don't do that. It's one reason we focus on Texas - so we can do it in person. You can't have as good an understanding of a client or a recruit if you can't get together with them and see how they operate." Larry gives two exampIes. One candidate wasn't completely "on point" for a particular position "but he was so great in person that we sent a letter to the client about him anyway."

The client agreed to schedule an interview with the candidate. In another situation, a company was searching for a general counsel. Larry met with the employer and subsequently declined to take on the recruiting job.

"I was turned off by the man I met with and by the atmosphere at the company," he says. "I couldn't have sent any candidates there - especially not a woman."

Monica Perin
HOUSTON BUSINESS JOURNAL