16 Nov Why Marsden? Nick Paleocrassas
Nick Paleocrassas is a senior member of our Strategic Assignments team who has been leading Marsden’s push into Europe. Nick has more than 20 years of partner and team recruitment experience in London and in key financial centres across Europe. He joined Marsden in 2019.
Nick studied English Literature at university and was considering studying law, before a temporary job turned into the beginning of a career in recruitment. For 12 years, he worked at one of the best-known legal search boutiques in London, taking a break in 2010 to study for an MBA at Cranfield. “I was fairly young when I started recruiting senior lawyers. I felt a business degree would help provide a better context to the work I was doing and give me the confidence to provide better service to clients and candidates,” said Nick.
His next role was at a major US-headquartered recruitment business. This gave him the chance to work in a larger, global organisation, with a different team structure and a more diversified approach. After five successful years he was introduced to Marsden by a mutual client. “The attraction was to develop more of a client-focused practice, with experienced colleagues in a more nimble and less corporate structure.”
Marsden’s Strategic Assignments team, led by founder Jonathan Marsden, works with some the world’s leading law firms to deliver on business-critical projects across the globe. The team has advised on office launches in Houston, Melbourne, Sydney, Dubai and Johannesburg; on mergers in Canada and Denmark; and on numerous group moves and key individual partner hires in the UK, across Europe, the Middle East, and the USA.
Since joining the team, Nick has led projects in the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Ukraine and Canada. These international searches mean that he is travelling at least once a month. “Meeting new people by Zoom worked well when we were restricted from travel during the pandemic, but there is no substitute to seeing someone in person. There are so many benefits to the ‘fly in fly out’ model. Partners appreciate you coming to see them and you can achieve a lot in a concentrated period of time.”
For Nick, Marsden offers a supportive, mature environment that allows the senior recruiters the flexibility to develop their professional interests. The firm has backed the European project by Ann-Marie Goodbody and Máiréad Cremins and there is scope to expand further, given how much opportunity there is across different markets and the global client base Marsden has developed.
Outside of work, Nick can be found at the cinema (he tries to go twice a week), running around London (he is training for the Athens Marathon) or on the island of Andros where he is from.