Legal recruitment in New Zealand is under pressure like never before
The talent pool is tight, competition is fierce, and Australian firms are aggressively headhunting across the Tasman, luring lawyers with salary hikes of up to 30 per cent. For local firms, the pressure to find, and keep, the right people is tough.
Jennifer Little knows those challenges better than most. After years working inside law firms and then in legal recruitment, she watched teams scramble to fill roles quickly and effectively.
“Every role felt urgent,” she says. “By the time firms came to me to engage my search services, they had tried everything, repeat advertising, multiple recruitment agencies, and they still couldn’t find the right candidate.”
It was here that Little leaned into an opportunity, and what began as a personal workaround to speed up her own recruitment research has grown into a homegrown legal-tech platform now used across the country and in Australia.
A tech founder who never planned to be one
Insource founder and managing director Jennifer Little and her dog, Millie.
Little didn’t set out to become a tech entrepreneur.
After working in law firms for a number of years, her first business was a specialist search and placement agency. With law firms arriving on her doorstep only after exhausting every other option, she needed a faster way to map the market. LinkedIn Recruiter couldn’t map the complete legal talent pool and the results were wide and often didn’t bring back exactly what was needed quickly, so she built her own tool, one that could turn around research lists in hours instead of weeks.
The results told their own story. Over three years, she used the tool to place 163 lawyers, including more than 30 during a rapid growth phase at Meredith Connell. With the development of Insource, she eventually stopped advertising roles altogether.
“I decided it would be better to give the tool to the law firms so they could take control of their recruitment directly in-house and save time and money, as opposed to finding and developing ‘more search recruiters to scale my then legal search and recruitment company.”
The launch of Insource
Little was ready to launch Insource in March 2020, just days before the first Covid lockdown.
“That year was extraordinary as we started our pivot away from recruitment to find firms applying hiring freezes. It was a challenging time, but it gave us time to talk more with the firms about what they needed Insource to do.”
When the launch took place a year later, the pitch was simple: make recruitment faster, smarter and far less stressful. the platform allows in-house human resources teams to generate a market talent map in seconds, build a longlist in minutes, and create a targeted shortlist in roughly half-an-hour.
Speed that changes the hiring game
“The day the hiring partner briefs their HR team, they can, within 30 minutes, generate a list of really good talent, some of whom will have worked with their employees,” Little says.
“Firms using Insource once spent thousands of dollars on agencies and still struggled to find the right talent. Now they can see exactly where the talent is, who’s moving, and where the opportunities are, instantly.
“Without visibility of the talent pool, many HR teams and hiring partners are working off assumptions that don’t reflect reality. I recently spoke to an HR manager at a respected Auckland firm recruiting a trusts and estates lawyer. In seconds, Insource was able to show 38 highly qualified lawyers that truly matched the brief and who might be open to a move. Five of the 38 were already known to the firm’s existing workforce.”
The impact is adding up. Clients have saved more than $2 million in recruitment costs in the past year alone. “Agencies are charging up to 25 per cent of a lawyer’s starting salary, which can be as much as $65,000 for one lawyer hire – enough to buy a brand-new Mini Cooper,” Little says.
Built for firms, not recruiters
Although there are similar platforms globally, Insource is the only tool of its kind that’s not licensed to both law firms and recruitment agencies.
“This is specifically built for law firms. It’s a tool developed by them and for them,” Little says. “When you’re spending $65,000 dollars on an agency fee for one lawyer, even at a standard hourly billing rate it takes well over 100 hours to recoup or break even on that.”
What’s coming next?
“We spent a lot of time collaborating with our customers and customer feedback is really critical for our success as they are the users,” Little says.
Over the last year, that feedback has driven new features and refinements across the platform.
Recent upgrades include an AI-assisted feature that automatically applies the right search filters.
“No one needs to be at the coalface anymore,” she says. “The platform does the heavy lifting and people make the decisions.”
Next on the roadmap is an Insights Reporting Tool – real-time analytics showing lawyer movement, retention trends and areas of market demand. It’s designed to help firms understand where they’re losing talent and how their teams compare with competitors.
More than 90 leading New Zealand and Australian firms of all sizes now use Insource, including global law firms and New Zealand’s top-tier and national law firms.
“We know from multiple surveys that more than 59 per cent of law firms are concerned about hiring right now, and at least 38 per cent say recruitment is harder than last year,” Little says. “Agencies on both sides of the Tasman tell us it can take 20 to 80 cold calls to place a lawyer, over at least six to eight weeks. The message is that recruitment has shifted. Firms used to start the process only when someone resigned. Today, with such a small pool of talent looking to move, you need to build relationships with good lawyers well before you need to hire — because hiring on demand is expensive, slow, and incredibly challenging.”
Insource was recently named an award-winning legal service provider by Australasian Lawyer, Little – recognition Little says reflects her hard-working team.
“One of our core company values is if our customers succeed, we succeed so we work closely with our customers to ensure they get direct value from the platform and that it saves them time when hiring.”
And somewhere in the middle of all that… opera
Running a fast-moving tech company with seven staff between Australia and New Zealand leaves little spare time, but Little still finds time – for opera.
A trained concert opera singer and former Lexus Song Quest semi-finalist, she has performed in major Australian venues and still sings several concerts a year, from oratorio to musical theatre.
“The business is the priority now, but I still do several really good concerts a year,” she says.
Her other constant companion is her eight-year-old black Labrador, Millie, rarely far from her desk in Palmerston North. Between client calls, platform updates, rehearsals and long nature walks, her life is a busy balance – but one she loves.
“Insource is fast-paced and it never stops. From the developers in one part of the business to the research analysts and the front-facing client team, there are so many different components within a technology start-up. When you unleash technology and it goes live — especially when you’re dealing with information – it just never stops.”
“I love people so I’m a real connector,” Little says. “I love matching the right people with the right opportunity. Recruitment was always about that. Insource just does it faster, smarter, and at scale.”
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