Hey, remember the talent wars? It doesn’t seem that long ago that law firms were falling over themselves to offer associates big salaries, fun perks, and as much work-life balance as they could handle. It never did get as crazy here as it did in the U.S. — $160,000 annual salaries for new graduates who hadn’t even articled — but the legal talent market in Canada bubbled and frothed along with the regular economy.

Cue the recession, and the demand for associates dropped off the radar, along with all the talk about how to be nice to Millennials so that they’ll work for you. More than a few senior partners enjoyed their moment of schadenfreude at the expense of the so-called 'Entitlement Generation.' But now both the boom and the bust are past, and it’s time for law firms to get serious again about recruitment.

The fact is, everything that was said about the talent wars over the last few years is true. There is a labour shortage coming, courtesy of demographic change, and a law firm is only as good (and as solvent) as its people and their willingness to come back into the office every day. Law firms need to get their talent intake systems right, and fast. But they need to be a whole lot smarter about it than they’ve been in the recent past.

Law firms tend to value the wrong things when recruiting talent. When evaluating recent graduates, they depend on law school marks (even while complaining about law school curriculum’s irrelevance to practice) and cocktail party performance. When assessing potential lateral hires, they look at 'books of business' and whether the lateral will generate revenue, rather than asking whether that business came courtesy of the lawyer’s own merits or through his or her former employer.

The skill set of a 21st-century lawyer will be notably different from what the last century’s practitioner possessed. As fixed-fee arrangements become more common, lawyers will be prized for project management skills and efficient work habits. As collaboration becomes more important, lawyers will be valued for their aptitude for teamwork and their willingness to share. As globalization and technology continue to advance, lawyers who are multi-lingual and scientifically adept will be in great demand. Painfully few firms now look for these assets in the recruitment process.

But beyond even these considerations lies a more fundamental adjustment for law firms: to recognize that the balance of power between a firm and its lawyers is shifting. While the buyer’s market still persists today, a seller’s market is going to kick in a few years from now and persist for a decade or so. As a result, firms looking to add talent will need to make an excellent case to a potential recruit why their firm, in particular, is without question the right one to join.

They’ll need to differentiate themselves from their faceless competition, something few firms can do today to their clients, let alone to potential hires. They’ll need to offer something more than salary — Millennials will still pour into the profession for another 15 years, and they really don’t value money above all. They’ll need to show that they’re meaningfully different and better, that theirs is a firm lawyers should fight to join.

Here’s what the insightful bestselling author Seth Godin says about this subject on his namesake blog:

'Recruiting is the act of finding the very best person for a job and persuading them to stop doing what they’re doing and come join you…. [I]t demands you have a job worth quitting for. The recruiter doesn’t solve an urgent problem for the person being recruited; in fact, they create one. That person already has a job (hence no problem). The problem being created is that until they change over to your job, they’ll be unhappy...Is your job opening so good you could recruit great people for it? If not, perhaps you need to work on that.'

Will firms get it? As I type this, word comes that powerhouse New York firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP has decided to bring on board some of its recently deferred new associates — but the choice of which associates will be conducted by lottery. That says everything you need to know about how even the biggest and richest firms still view lawyer recruitment. It won’t last.