V&E Recruiter Turns to Wall Street Playbook to Cultivate New Talent

The new head of recruitment at Vinson & Elkins is betting that adopting Wall Street’s practice of training entry-level associates to move up through the ranks will give the global law firm an edge in a tight labor market, Bloomberg Law reported.

Chief Talent Officer Hy Pomerance, who previously worked as a human resources executive at Swiss lender UBS and New York Life Insurance Co., has hired seven “attorney development professionals,” to help V&E partners identify talented associates and coach them to become leaders, according to the news outlet.

“Executives growing up in banking are being developed from the time they are associates,” Pomerance told Bloomberg Law, while most law firm partners “haven’t had a stick of professional development.”

All of the new development staffers are former lawyers who have undergone training as career coaches, according to Bloomberg.

V&E employed 667 attorneys as of 2021, making it the 74^th-largest firm in the U.S., according to National Law Journal 500 rankings. More than 100 years old, V&E has 12 offices around the world, including in Houston, New York, London and Tokyo.

Ten V&E lawyers won spots in Lawdragon’s 2022 list of 500 Leading Lawyers in America.