Germany does not have a shortage of lawyers.
At the beginning of 2026, 167,547 lawyers were admitted to practise in Germany, according to the Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer (BRAK).
Yet companies can still spend months trying to hire one.
The number of lawyers in Germany only tells you so much. Every legal hire quickly narrows the field. Qualification, area of law, seniority, industry experience, location, salary and working arrangements can each remove a sizeable part of the market.
By the time you reach the lawyers who genuinely fit the role and might actually consider moving - the candidate pool can look very different.
That is where legal recruitment becomes more difficult.
The job of a legal headhunter is therefore not simply to produce more CVs. It is to understand which part of the market actually matters, whether the brief reflects that market and what will persuade the right lawyers to consider the opportunity.
Start with the market, not the job description
Start with the market, not the job description
A good search starts with good alignment.
If the brief is too narrow, the salary is out of step with the market or expectations around experience are unrealistic, the role can sit open for months.
That creates its own problem.
Recruitment can be a little like selling a house. If a property is overpriced and sits on the market for too long, buyers start to wonder what is wrong with it. Interest fades.
The same can happen with jobs.
Candidates notice when a role has been advertised for months, repeatedly reposted or discussed across the market without being filled. It can create questions around compensation, the hiring process, the team or the role itself.
That is why it is worth getting the fundamentals right before going to market.
Is the salary realistic? Are the title, reporting line and working model attractive enough for the people you want to reach?
The initial brief does not need to be perfect, but it does need to be grounded in the reality of the market. A strong search should then keep testing those assumptions as candidate feedback comes in.
Why legal hiring can be difficult for internal recruitment teams
Strong internal recruitment teams can absolutely hire lawyers successfully.
The challenge is often one of frequency and market exposure.
A business might recruit dozens of salespeople, engineers or product specialists every year. Internal recruiters therefore build a good understanding of those profiles, competing employers and candidate expectations.
Legal teams are normally much smaller.
A company might employ hundreds of people across another function but only six lawyers and all six may do different jobs.
For an internal recruiter who has not recently hired legal talent, there can therefore be a steep learning curve.
Which companies employ the relevant lawyers?
Which law firms should be targeted?
Are the salary and title realistic?
None of this means the work cannot be done internally. But when legal hiring is infrequent or the profile is particularly narrow, using someone who works in that candidate market every day can shorten the learning curve considerably.
When does using a legal headhunter make sense?
Not every legal hire requires an external recruiter.
If the profile is relatively broad, the company has a strong employer brand and direct applications are producing the right candidates, internal recruitment may be entirely sufficient.
External search becomes more useful as the addressable market gets narrower or the importance of the hire increases.
That commonly includes:
- General Counsel and Head of Legal appointments
- first in-house legal hires
- difficult combinations of legal and industry expertise
- regulatory or technical specialists
- confidential replacements
- transformation or transaction-driven hires
The useful question is not simply:
Should we use a recruiter?
It is:
How difficult will it be for us to identify, engage and assess the lawyers who could genuinely do this job?
How to choose a legal headhunter in Germany
If you do bring in an external search partner, look beyond the size of their database.
A few questions reveal quite a lot.
What percentage of your work is actually legal recruitment?
Regular exposure to the market matters. Legal career paths, qualifications and practice areas are not always obvious from a CV.
What does the candidate market for this role look like?
They will not know everything before beginning the search, but they should have an informed view.
Who will personally conduct the search?
It is worth knowing who will actually represent your company to candidates.
How will you find lawyers outside your existing network?
A network is useful. Proper research still matters.
Which parts of our specification would you challenge?
If the answer is “none” after a detailed discussion, you may be buying execution rather than advice.
A large profession made up of small markets
Germany had 167,547 admitted lawyers at the beginning of 2026.
For an individual hiring company, that headline number is not particularly important.
Every search creates its own much smaller candidate market, shaped by legal specialism, qualification, seniority, industry, location, compensation and motivation.
The companies that tend to hire well understand which of those requirements genuinely matter, listen when the market challenges their assumptions and can explain convincingly why the right lawyer should leave a good position to join them.
That is ultimately what good legal headhunting should help a company do.
Deep Blue Recruitment specialises in hiring in-house legal talent across Germany, from appointing General Counsel and other senior legal leaders through to Legal Counsel and Senior Legal Counsel.
If you're planning a legal hire in Germany and want an early view of what the candidate market is likely to look like, get in touch.
Advice for Recruiting and Retaining Legal Talent
Practical insights from specialist legal headhunters to help you build and keep a strong legal team.
