Secondments

At Crowell & Moring, we measure success by our ability to provide excellent client service while at the same time meeting our clients' growing needs for creative solutions to their legal, and in many cases, staffing and budgeting challenges. One such strategy, which an increasing number of our clients are participating in, is the firm's secondment program.  Over the past five years, we have seconded our lawyers with a number of clients.

We have provided seconded lawyers to our clients for many reasons -- to expand into a new area of need in the legal department, to handle a special project, or to cover for an in-house lawyer on a leave of absence.  We have tailored our secondments to meet our clients' needs, covering for as little as three months to as long as a year.  On the important issue of economics, we work to align secondment engagements in such a way that they make financial sense and can often replicate the cost incurred by hiring an internal resource. 

Typically the lawyers we embed with our clients have four years or more of experience, ensuring they have sufficient practice breadth and knowledge. And we encourage our seconded lawyers to reach back to the firm to access the necessary industry, business or legal expertise during the secondment, which ensures that they will provide a broad range of expertise to our clients.

We appreciate that the more we know about our clients' business, the better we can serve them.  Having one of our lawyers “inside” offers us insight that is difficult to replicate, allows us to achieve our mutual objectives more readily, and provides our clients with an affordable, flexible solution to their staffing needs.

Our secondments have generated real value for our clients and for the lawyers who have participated, well beyond the secondment period.  Our clients benefit from having lawyers back at the firm who have intimate knowledge of their business, their people, and their strategic goals and perspectives.  The secondments have likewise enhanced the careers of our lawyers who have returned to the firm with valuable in-house experience and client relationships to cultivate further going forward.