My roles
Every mandate the firm currently has on CounselMatch, with the recruiters engaged on each and where the candidates actually sit. Click a role for its pipeline and its recruiter ranking.
Recruiter market
Eighteen boutique recruiters, ranked by what they have actually delivered rather than by who called you last. Hit-rate is placements divided by briefs taken over the last twelve months, measured across every firm on the platform — the number no single firm can see on its own.
Performance separates the market
Hit-rate against median days to fill. Each dot is one recruiter; dot size is placements in the last twelve months. The shaded quadrant is faster and more reliable than the market median.
Axes and both median lines are fixed to the whole market of 18 recruiters, so filtering never moves the goalposts. The table below is the same data, sortable and searchable.
Post a role
Describe the mandate. CounselMatch ranks the recruiter panel by niche fit and by delivered hit-rate, then you invite the ones you want. The role appears in My roles immediately.
Matched recruiters
Brief board
Live mandates across every firm on CounselMatch. Firms stay anonymous until you claim the brief. You can hold three active claims at a time — release one to take another.
My briefs
The briefs you have claimed. The firm is revealed, the clock is running, and every candidate you submit is recorded against your hit-rate in this niche.
My performance
Your side of the trust graph. These are the same numbers firms see when they rank the panel — which is why the record, not the relationship, is what wins the next brief.
Hit-rate by niche
Placements as a share of briefs taken, last twelve months. Your overall rate is the weighted blend of these three.
Placements by month
Twelve months to August 2026. Hover or use the arrow keys to read a month.
Where you rank, niche by niche
Ranking is against every recruiter on CounselMatch who has taken a brief in that niche in the last twelve months.
Your monthly record
The table behind both charts above.
About this play
Why a recruiter marketplace is the second-order idea, and not the AI screening tool everyone builds first.
The wedge
The obvious first-order product in legal hiring is an AI recruiter: a tool that reads CVs, screens candidates and writes the shortlist. CounselMatch skips that and builds the layer underneath it — a marketplace where firms post a role and vetted independent recruiters compete to fill it. Legal is the right beachhead because the fees are large enough that a thin take-rate still pays (20% to 25% of base salary), because credentials are legible enough to vet at scale (admission, practice area, post-qualification experience), and because the buyer network is small and dense: Australian legal hiring runs through a few hundred firms and a few dozen boutique recruiters who all already know each other.
What it accrues
Running that marketplace produces a record that neither side can assemble alone: which recruiters actually deliver, in which niches, and how fast — and, pointing the other way, which firms actually hire versus which ones fish the market for market intelligence and never sign anyone. Today a firm's view of a recruiter is one relationship and a few anecdotes. A recruiter's view of a firm is the same. The platform sees every brief, every submission and every placement, so it can say that a recruiter converts 75% of projects and energy briefs at a median of 31 days, and that the number is measured across eleven firms rather than one. That performance history is the moat: a new entrant with the same software starts with zero signal, and signal is the whole product.
The two parties
On one side, hiring firms and in-house legal teams who want the brief filled and cannot tell a good recruiter from a busy one. On the other, independent and boutique recruiters whose track record is currently trapped inside their own CRM and worth nothing when they walk into a new firm. CounselMatch connects them by making that track record portable and public. The unique knowledge cuts both ways: recruiter hit-rates by niche on one side, firm-side responsiveness and the real (rather than advertised) requirements on the other — which is why the brief board in this demo shows what the panel actually screens for, not what the job advert says.
Endgame
The business model is a take-rate on placements, charged to the employer and shared with the recruiter, in the Paraform pattern. The expansion is a third-order move: the same trust graph works for any professional-services employer and any specialist recruiter, so lawyers are the beachhead for accountants, consultants, in-house counsel, business development professionals and paralegals — the entire non-technical talent market, which has no equivalent of the technical-recruiting marketplaces. It also shares a spine with a legal business-development exchange: one matches legal work to firms, this matches legal people to firms, over the same buyers and the same trust mechanics.
What would validate it
Two boutique legal recruiters agreeing to take briefs through a platform, and one firm talent lead agreeing to post a real role. Marketplace validation is pairwise — one side alone proves nothing.