Case Study
FromCounsel
TalentStack partnered with FromCounsel and CRO Jonathan Durrant to strengthen its commercial team, placing two LegalTech hires across sales and customer success. Both roles required legal market knowledge, scale-up experience, and capability beyond job titles.
The challenge
Finding specialist commercial talent in a highly competitive LegalTech market.
FromCounsel was entering a new phase of commercial growth.
With Jonathan Durrant joining as CRO, the business was strengthening its commercial function, opening new opportunities and building a team capable of supporting the next stage of growth.
TalentStack was initially engaged to recruit a senior commercial hire.
The requirement went beyond finding an experienced Account Executive. FromCounsel needed someone who understood the legal market, could build credibility with sophisticated legal stakeholders and was comfortable selling a specialist platform into law firms and legal teams.
The partnership then expanded into Customer Success.
This presented a different challenge.
FromCounsel was not looking for a traditional Customer Success Manager focused on a small portfolio of strategic accounts.
The successful hire needed to operate across customer success, onboarding, training, professional services, product feedback and support, acting as a genuine voice of the customer while the function continued to take shape.
Both searches were taking place in an increasingly competitive LegalTech hiring market, with strong candidates regularly managing multiple processes and compensation expectations moving quickly.
Our approach
Mapping the LegalTech market around capability, not just job titles.
TalentStack worked closely with Jonathan to continually calibrate both searches against the market.
For the commercial search, TalentStack focused heavily on candidates already selling into legal stakeholders and mapped talent across the LegalTech ecosystem.
The successful candidate, Siraj Ghuwel, was identified from Definely, bringing direct LegalTech experience and an existing understanding of the customers and market FromCounsel serves.
Siraj progressed through the interview process and accepted an offer to join the business, completing the search in 16 days.
For Customer Success, the search required a different approach.
Rather than exclusively targeting conventional CSM profiles, TalentStack worked with Jonathan to define the underlying capabilities the role actually required.
The team mapped candidates across businesses including iManage, Definely, Luminance, Ontra, Intapp, ThoughtRiver and other LegalTech organisations, assessing them against customer management, onboarding, professional services, product exposure and their ability to work effectively in a scale-up environment.
That approach led TalentStack to Max Edgson.
Max had built his career across LegalTech businesses including Luminance, Atticus and Solve Intelligence, with experience spanning customer success, onboarding, product, pre-sales and commercial responsibilities.
His background aligned closely with FromCounsel's requirement for someone comfortable wearing multiple hats rather than operating within a narrowly defined Customer Success function.
TalentStack worked closely with Max throughout the process, providing detailed interview preparation around FromCounsel's market, leadership team, customer environment and expectations for the role.
He accepted the offer to join as Customer Success and Onboarding Manager, completing the search in 18 days.
The results
Two specialist hires across sales and customer success.
TalentStack successfully delivered both hires as FromCounsel strengthened its commercial organisation.
Siraj Ghuwel
Client Relationship Manager
Placed in 16 days
Max Edgson
Customer Success and Onboarding Manager
Placed in 18 days
The partnership resulted in:
- 2 specialist LegalTech hires
- Sales and Customer Success functions strengthened
- Both searches completed in under six weeks
- Direct LegalTech experience secured across both hires
- Candidate market mapped across many of the UK's leading LegalTech businesses
- Continuous search calibration with the CRO
- Detailed candidate preparation throughout the interview process
Most importantly, the searches demonstrated the value of recruiting around the actual problem a business needs someone to solve rather than simply matching candidates against job titles.
For FromCounsel, that meant finding a proven LegalTech commercial hire on one search and, on the other, recognising that the strongest Customer Success candidate might come from a broader product, onboarding and GTM background.