Lee Ann Bellon, who started Atlanta's first legal recruitment service 23 years ago, has a new boss. She has sold her company to Ajilon Professional Services, a subsidiary of staffing giant Adecco.
The sale of Bellon & Associates, for a price Bellon would not disclose, is another milestone in legal recruiting's evolution from a business lawyers once knew little about and trusted even less to a highly competitive industry.
In 1983, Bellon was a high school teacher married to a lawyer when she saw an article on legal recruiters in The American Lawyer magazine (a Daily Report affiliate). There were only 13 in the country at the time.
"I had more guts than good sense," she said of her decision to become the city's first legal headhunter. She said that when she called firms to tell them about her new service, they first said they'd never heard of headhunters and then told her they'd never use one. "This was when partners did not move," she said.
It took her six months to make her first placement, she said, but business quickly snowballed.
Other Atlanta legal recruiters said that Ajilon's purchase of Bellon & Associates is part of the industry's consolidation, where gigantic general staffing companies are moving into the lower-revenue but higher-profit area of permanent lawyer placement. Recruiters generally make 25 to 30 percent of a lawyer's first year of compensation for a placement
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