07 Sep Why Marsden? Pete Van Name
Pete Van Name joined Marsden’s US team in July 2025 after more than a decade working in recruitment and talent roles within some of the US’s leading law firms. Having spent 15 years in New York, he relocated to Massachusetts in July 2026 to spearhead the opening of Marsden’s Boston office.
Pete’s route into legal recruitment was not one he had planned. After studying political science at university, he briefly considered a career as a lawyer before taking his first job at an international law firm. He then joined Skadden Arps to gain exposure to the profession, working primarily on hiring conflict resolution within the global talent team. He quickly discovered that while he was fascinated by the legal world and enjoyed working in a law firm, becoming a lawyer himself was not necessarily the right path. “Like most people who find themselves in legal recruiting, I didn’t really know that it existed,” he says. “It’s not a job that you grow up aspiring to have.”
Pete’s career took him from Skadden to litigation boutique Selendy Gay and subsequently Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The three firms provided very different perspectives on legal recruiting. At Skadden, Pete experienced the scale of graduate recruitment within a major international law firm, including large summer associate programs and law school recruitment. At Selendy Gay, then a relatively young and rapidly growing, powerhouse litigation boutique, his remit expanded across recruitment, talent, professional development and HR. At Wachtell, he returned to a more focused legal recruitment role spanning entry-level, judicial clerk and lateral associate hiring.
Over time, it was lateral recruitment that increasingly caught his attention. “I started to discover that the lateral market was a whole other part of the US legal recruiting world,” he says. “Lateral hiring requires an understanding of not only what a practice needs today but also what their clients’ needs will be in six months or a year from now, the substantive experience required and who can make an immediate impact.”
A meeting with Marsden US Co-heads David Nicol and Nick Welsh one summer afternoon in NYC, opened the initial conversations that ultimately provided the opportunity for Pete to focus completely on lateral hiring. Moving from an internal role to a search and recruitment firm meant learning a very different side of recruitment, but Pete’s experience also brought an interesting perspective to Marsden. “I think there was value I brought across in the form of hiring partner or recruiting committees’ perspectives – how firms evaluate candidates, how they look at talent, how they look at working with recruiters, and what sort of recruiters are more or less successful and why,” he says.
At the same time, the move gave Pete the autonomy to develop his own desk and relationships. Coming from law firms with established structures and ways of working, he has particularly appreciated the freedom consultants have to develop their practices and work in a way that suits them. He was also attracted to how collaborative Marsden is despite its geographically dispersed team. “It really is a testament to the team that they’ve built, that people genuinely like what they do and who they work with. Even though in some ways it’s a very individual contributor occupation, people are very collaborative. There are a lot of team-oriented goals around how we can all add value in a way that’s great for the wider business.”
Pete’s practice has naturally developed around areas where his previous law firm experience gives him particularly strong insight. A major focus is transactional M&A, particularly lawyers operating at the top end of the US market. Having worked inside firms renowned for sophisticated transactional practices means he understands the work beyond what appears on a résumé: how deal teams operate, the nature of the transactions and the experience lawyers gain at different stages of their careers.
He has also developed a growing focus on restructuring and capital structure solutions, where firms are increasingly bringing together expertise spanning restructuring, finance, banking and capital markets. This specialist knowledge is central to him being able to offer meaningful career advice.
“Getting to work with candidates who are looking for the next chapter in their career and really being able to advise them and guide them through what can be a very complicated or difficult process is incredibly rewarding.”
The agency side also brings inevitable disappointments. A recruiter can spend weeks advising someone through a move only for circumstances to change at the last moment. Pete has learned that the important thing is to think beyond the immediate deal. “While there are inevitably transactions in the business, for me, and I think for Marsden it’s not purely a transactional business; it’s a relationship business,” he says. “Every interaction is a potential relationship, whether it’s a candidate or a client.” He recently saw that philosophy come full circle when a lawyer he had first recruited nearly a decade earlier contacted him out of the blue. Now a partner, the lawyer wanted to introduce Pete to his firm’s hiring team because they needed help recruiting associates.
Pete’s next chapter combined a personal move with an important step in the continued growth of Marsden’s US practice. Pete and his family were considering a move to New England, and when he began discussing the idea internally, it quickly became apparent that Boston also represented a compelling opportunity for Marsden.
The city has particular strengths across private equity, venture capital, emerging companies, healthcare and life sciences, alongside sophisticated M&A and transactional practices – areas that align closely with Marsden’s client base and sector focus.
Pete has also seen growing demand from clients looking to hire lawyers in Boston or expand existing teams, alongside significant lateral movement involving some of the leading firms in the US market. “When we sat down and asked whether it made sense to have a Boston office and a deliberate focus here, the answer was a resounding ‘yes’,” Pete says. “There is plenty of potential opportunity in Boston.” Additionally, Marsden’s ethos has always been to align ourselves with our clients. The Senior Management Team had already been thinking about growth in Boston as several of Marsden’s key clients had launched or were expanding in the city, and Life Sciences is one of the firm’s core sector focuses.
That opportunity reflects Boston’s emergence as one of the most active growth markets in the US legal sector. Lateral activity has accelerated significantly over the past three years, with nine major firms opening offices in the city and more than 1,300 lateral moves, including over 450 partners, during the same period, according to Firm Prospects.
Crucially, Pete sees many firms’ Boston practices as significant businesses in their own right, serving a sophisticated local client base rather than simply operating as satellite offices. As Marsden establishes its presence in the city, he has the opportunity to put that same philosophy into practice: building strong local relationships and specialist market knowledge on the ground, while drawing on the connections and expertise of colleagues across the US and Marsden’s wider global platform.
