For hiring principals

Hiring for investigations, disputes and intelligence teams.

A buyer’s view of how retained search works in our markets - written for advisory-firm partners, law-firm practice heads, in-house general counsel, compliance and integrity leaders, private-equity sponsors and the public-sector appointment committees we quietly run searches for.

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Practices we recruit across

Eleven disciplines. One retained standard.

Forensic Accounting
Corporate Investigations
Digital Forensics & eDiscovery
Disputes & Arbitration Experts
Regulatory Investigations & Compliance
Restructuring & Insolvency
Workplace Investigations
Asset Tracing
Cyber Investigations
Crisis Management
Geopolitical Risk & Intelligence

How clients engage us

Retained, confidential, and on the client's terms.

Four engagement shapes cover the overwhelming majority of what we do. Each starts with a written retainer, a defined scope, and an agreed level of confidentiality - no speculative CVs circulating in the market, and no candidate ever put forward without explicit, informed permission.

Retained search is our default. The client commissions us exclusively to identify, approach, assess and close a named appointment. A retainer structure aligns incentives for a patient, thorough search rather than a fast placement. Most of our retained work is Director level and above, and a meaningful proportion is at the partnership or head-of-function layer.

Confidential search covers the searches the client cannot afford to be seen running. Succession at the top of a practice. A new regional hub whose existence is not yet public. A remediation programme that has not yet been announced. The brief is run off-market, the shortlist is small, and the client and their advisors remain the only parties who know the search is in train until the offer is accepted.

Team lift is for the situations where a single senior hire is not the solution. A practice needs to stand up an entire sub-team in a new geography. A firm is moving an established group out of a competitor. An in-house function needs to scale from two to eight over two quarters. These engagements require careful choreography - conflict checks, sequencing, communications - and we structure them to protect everyone involved.

Interim resourcing is used where the need is acute and the permanent hire is still several months away. A live matter that requires a senior investigator for twelve weeks. A gap between a departure and an identified successor. A regulator-driven programme that needs a specialist lead on day one. We maintain a small, vetted roster of senior practitioners who operate in this mode.

Who we serve

Seven buyer categories. One standard of discretion.

Each of these clients engages us on retained terms. What differs is what they need to achieve and how their internal appointment process is organised.

Big Four advisory practices

Global forensic, disputes, investigations and cyber practices operating at scale.

The largest professional-services firms engage us when they need to add senior capability to an established practice, launch a new sub-specialism, or make a regional appointment where the on-the-ground candidate pool is thin. Global reach is assumed; cross-jurisdictional credibility and cultural fluency are the differentiators.

Mandates are typically Director, Senior Director, Managing Director or Partner. Many are confidential team-lift situations where the incoming hire brings portable client relationships or a specialist capability the practice does not yet have in the region. Conflict-checking runs in parallel with the search from day one.

Typical briefs

Partner and Director appointments in forensic accounting
Senior investigators and forensic technologists
Disputes and arbitration expert witnesses
Regional heads of forensic, cyber or investigations
Laterals with portable client relationships

Specialist boutiques

Craft-led firms competing on independence, senior attention and the freedom to turn down conflicted work.

The specialist boutiques - many founded by senior practitioners who left the global firms - retain us when they need to add a headline practitioner whose reputation strengthens the firm's positioning, or when they are entering a new geography or sub-specialism for the first time.

These engagements are almost always confidential and retained. Conflict-checking matters acutely; fit with an established partnership culture matters even more. The best boutique hires are rarely visible on the open market, which is why off-market sourcing is a routine expectation rather than an exception.

Typical briefs

Founding-partner-grade hires
Senior practitioners with courtroom or tribunal pedigree
Investigators with cross-border reach
Specialist leads in forensic technology, asset tracing and cyber
Senior associates with a clear partnership trajectory

Law firms

Disputes, arbitration, white-collar, eDiscovery and investigations practices retaining non-legal expertise.

Law firms retain us on two fronts. The first is to add senior non-legal expertise - forensic accountants, data scientists, investigators and digital-evidence specialists - to the dispute-advisory and investigations teams that sit alongside the practising lawyers. The second is to identify and approach expert witnesses whose reputation, clarity under cross-examination and written-report defensibility materially affect case outcomes.

Retention is almost always exclusive. Briefs are tightly scoped, confidentiality is non-negotiable, and cross-border reach - particularly into Asia-Pacific and the Gulf - features on a rising proportion of mandates.

Typical briefs

Expert witnesses in quantum, damages, valuation and forensic accounting
Heads of eDiscovery and digital forensics
Forensic technologists for investigations practices
Investigations managers and directors
Arbitration-specialist experts with tribunal experience

Regulated corporates

In-house integrity, investigations, financial-crime and regulatory-response teams at banks, insurers, asset managers, exchanges and infrastructure operators.

Regulated corporates have built out in-house investigations capability that barely existed a decade ago. Head of Investigations, Director of Integrity, Head of Financial Crime and Group Investigations Counsel are now mainstream appointments across financial services, insurance, infrastructure and exchanges.

Mandates are shaped by regulatory intensity. Supervisory expectations, sanctions regimes, consumer-duty obligations and cross-border data rules all raise the bar on the skillset expected. We are retained to find practitioners who combine deep regulatory literacy with the operational judgement to lead an in-house team through a live matter.

Typical briefs

Heads of investigations and group investigations
Directors of integrity and financial crime
Senior regulatory-response leads
Heads of anti-bribery and sanctions
Senior counsel for financial-crime remediation

Private-equity sponsors

Portfolio-level integrity and investigations appointments across the deal lifecycle.

Private-equity sponsors increasingly treat investigations capability as a value-creation priority, not a cost. We are retained at three points in the portfolio lifecycle: pre-deal, to identify integrity risk before committing capital; post-close, to install senior investigations or compliance leadership at a portfolio company; and pre-exit, when the prospective acquirer's diligence requires a cleaner operational posture than the portfolio company currently presents.

These mandates move quickly and are rarely advertised. Sponsors value practitioners who read commercial reality as fluently as regulatory reality, and who can move between operator and advisor roles without losing either lens.

Typical briefs

Portfolio-wide heads of integrity
Investigations leads at portfolio companies
Pre-exit remediation specialists
Operating-partner-grade forensic practitioners
Senior anti-bribery and sanctions advisors

Technology firms

In-house investigations, cyber, trust-and-safety and fraud-response teams at platforms, payments and digital-asset businesses.

Technology firms are building the in-house forensic, cyber and fraud-response capability that regulated industries built a decade before them. The pace is accelerating as platforms, payments businesses and digital-asset firms face the same supervisory expectations that banks have long faced, and as product surfaces, generative-AI deployments and cross-border data flows create entirely new investigative terrain.

We are retained to find senior practitioners who can operate credibly alongside engineering and product leadership. Technical fluency is table-stakes; so is the judgement to know when an internal matter has escalated into a regulatory one.

Typical briefs

Heads of investigations and global integrity
Directors of fraud and anti-bribery
Cyber-investigations and threat-intelligence leads
Trust-and-safety investigations leads
Digital-asset compliance and investigations heads

Government, regulators and state investors

Statutory bodies, enforcement agencies, sovereign funds and central-bank investigations leadership.

Public-sector and sovereign mandates require a different posture: patience through lengthy appointment cycles, discretion about who is being approached and why, and the diplomatic literacy to make a private-sector senior practitioner feel comfortable crossing into public-service work. Our longest retained relationships are in this segment.

Briefs concentrate at the leadership layer - statutory-body heads of investigations, agency-level directors of enforcement, sovereign-fund integrity leads. Each appointment is scrutinised by multiple stakeholders, and the candidates most compelling for these seats are the ones with a track record of working cleanly at the intersection of public and private sector.

Typical briefs

Statutory heads of investigations and enforcement
Sovereign-fund integrity and investigations leads
Senior counsel for public-sector enforcement
Directors for cross-border enforcement coordination
Heads of investigations at central banks and exchanges

What sets these mandates apart

The buyer-side view of a shifting market.

Every client category above sits inside the same set of forces. The specifics below are the themes we hear in the opening conversation of almost every retainer we accept.

Cross-border reach is no longer a differentiator; it is a threshold. The matters that now drive senior appointments - arbitration work, sanctions exposure, regulator interaction, integrity assessments across regional portfolios - very rarely sit in a single jurisdiction. Clients ask, first, where the candidate has actually operated, not merely where they have held a title.

Enforcement pressure keeps raising the skills bar. Supervisors have expanded, data-protection regimes have interlocked, and the cost of a poorly-handled matter has risen sharply. Clients expect senior practitioners whose written-report work is defensible under cross-examination, whose judgement on privilege and disclosure is sound, and who have operated in environments where the consequence of an error is measured in public reputation rather than internal feedback.

The in-house build-out is not finished. Regulated corporates have stopped buying investigations capability exclusively as a service and started hiring it permanently. The same logic is now spreading into technology groups and into the more mature portfolio companies of private-equity sponsors. Each of these buyers approaches the appointment process differently, and the best candidates are increasingly selective about which culture they cross into.

AI has changed the skills specification for senior hires. Clients no longer ask whether a candidate is comfortable with technology; they ask how the candidate governs its use. The senior practitioners most in demand can describe, in plain language, how an AI-assisted workflow was validated, what the review protocol was, and who signed off on the opinion. That specificity now matters at interview as much as the practice area itself.

Private-equity is reshaping the demand curve. Sponsors move more quickly than most clients, pay attention to integrity risk earlier in the deal cycle than they used to, and place appointments where the successful candidate has to operate in several registers at once - commercial, regulatory, board. The candidates who thrive in these seats are a small, identifiable set, and much of our retained work is concentrated on reaching them before anyone else does.

How we run a mandate

A senior-led, retained process - from brief to offer.

Every mandate starts with a written brief, agreed with the client and signed by both sides. The brief captures the appointment rationale, the assessment criteria, the competitive landscape the client is operating in, the conflict map, and the confidentiality posture. No search leaves this stage without that document in place.

The search itself is run by the Partner retained on the matter, not handed to a research team. Approaches are senior-to-senior and always made on a named basis. Candidates are introduced to a client only with explicit, informed permission, and never in a group or panel where their interest could be inferred by others in the market.

The full process - scoping, research, approach, assessment, shortlist, offer, referencing, transition - is documented in detail in our methodology note. Read the methodology.

Next step

A conversation before a brief.

Most retained mandates start with a private thirty-minute conversation - no obligation, no proposal document - in which we hear the appointment context, share the market view, and agree whether we are the right firm to run the search. You can initiate that conversation from either route below.

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