WHAT WE DO
A professional advisory firm for lawyers considering important career transitions.
The right firm makes all the difference.
A law firm can accelerate your career, limit it, or quietly wear you down.
Ascent Counsel helps lawyers evaluate their options and make thoughtful moves to firms where they can do better work, create more value, and build fulfilling careers.
Ascent Counsel was founded by a former Big Law lawyer, law firm partner, and three-time General Counsel. That background matters.
Important career decisions deserve more than a recruiter. They deserve judgment, perspective, and honest advice from someone who understands law firms, clients, and the realities of building a legal career.
Given Matt's experience, he'll surface opportunities others might not think about and will bring ideas that might not otherwise have been on your radar.
To help lawyers find the right firm for their practices, ambitions, and lives and to help law firms find lawyers who will thrive.
Our Mission
Advice shaped by real experience, not a database of listings.
Judgment
The right move works for the lawyer, the firm, and the clients.
Fit
We'll you whether a move makes sense for you or not.
Honesty
It Starts With YouFinding the right firm begins with understanding your practice, your experience, your goals, and what is no longer working at your current firm.
We help you understand the market, evaluate your options, and decide what actually makes sense. The right move should work for the lawyer, the firm, the clients, and everyone affected by the transition. That takes more than matching credentials to an opening. It takes judgment, discretion, and a clear view of what the move is meant to accomplish.
Sometimes the right decision is to leave. Sometimes it is to stay. Sometimes it is to stay for now and prepare for the move you should make later.
National Reach. Selective Work.Ascent Counsel is based in Chicago and works with lawyers and law firms across the country, with select international reach.
We do not limit the work to one city or one practice area.
We follow the opportunity and focus on finding the right fit for the lawyer, the firm, and the practice. Opportunities are not limited by geography or practice group, and neither are we.
What defines our work is selectivity. We partner with law firms whose opportunities, platforms, and cultures we believe in, and we work with exceptional lawyers whose experience and ambitions align with those opportunities. We do not aim to work on every search or represent every candidate we focus on the relationships and opportunities where we believe we can add meaningful value.
Real experience as a lawyer, partner, and three-time General Counsel.
Experienced
Discretion and trust are at the center of everything we do.
Confidential
We take on a limited number of searches to deliver exceptional results.
Selective
You Don't Have to Be Ready. Just Informed.Curiosity is enough.
If you are questioning whether your current firm still fits, wondering what the market may hold, or ready to explore what comes next, let's have a conversation.