Five years ago, a senior legal or compliance hire in London could usually start within three months of accepting an offer. That is no longer a safe assumption. Across the 31 Legal & Compliance placements we made in London over the past two years, the median gap between signed offer and first day was 19 weeks. In 2019 it was 11.
Most hiring plans have not caught up. Clients still tend to fix a start date before the search begins, then discover at offer stage that their preferred candidate cannot join for six months.
What has changed
The biggest shift is in the contract itself. More employers are writing longer notice into senior contracts, and more of them are enforcing it in full. These are the typical periods we see, by level:
Level | Typical notice, 2019 | Typical notice, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
Senior Associate or Compliance Manager | 1 month | 1 to 3 months |
Senior Counsel or Head of Compliance (business unit) | 3 months | 3 months |
Head of Legal or Head of Compliance | 3 months | 6 months |
General Counsel or Chief Compliance Officer | 6 months | 6 to 12 months |
MLRO or other approved senior manager | 3 to 6 months | 6 months, plus approval |
The bottom three rows are where planning goes wrong. A General Counsel on twelve months’ notice is no longer unusual. We placed three this year.
Why legal and compliance in particular
Three factors are pushing notice periods up faster in these functions than elsewhere.
Regulatory accountability. Under the UK senior managers regime, an approved individual in a regulated firm cannot simply walk out. The firm needs a successor approved, or at least an interim arrangement the regulator will accept. Employers have lengthened notice to protect themselves, and the approval process for the incoming hire adds its own weeks at the other end.
Retention by contract. Faced with a tight market for experienced financial crime and regulatory specialists, some employers have chosen to make leaving slower rather than staying more attractive. Six months’ notice at Head of Compliance level is now common in banking and payments.
Garden leave as the default. Employers are more likely to put departing legal and compliance leaders on garden leave for the full term, particularly where the new role is with a competitor.
Planning around it
Longer notice is a fact of the market. It does not have to derail a hire. What works:
Ask about notice in the first call, not at offer. We record it at screening for every candidate and show it on the shortlist.
Start the search earlier. For a General Counsel or Chief Compliance Officer, we now advise clients to brief us nine to twelve months before they need someone in post.
Cover the gap deliberately. An interim, a well-briefed deputy or an external adviser on a fixed retainer costs far less than a rushed appointment.
Run regulatory approval in parallel. Where the role needs approval, prepare the application as soon as the offer is signed, not when the candidate starts.
Negotiating early release
Most employers will negotiate on notice, but rarely by much and rarely at the outset. In our experience, a release of one to two months is achievable when the candidate has a clear handover plan, a credible successor or interim is in place, and the new employer is not a direct competitor.
Asking the new employer to buy out the notice period is unusual in legal roles, and it tends to damage the candidate’s relationship with the firm they are leaving.
A realistic timeline
For a Head of Legal or Head of Compliance at a regulated firm in London, a realistic plan now looks like this:
Weeks 1 to 3: briefing and research, with a shortlist by around day 21
Weeks 4 to 9: interviews, referencing and offer
Weeks 10 to 36: notice period, with any regulatory approval running alongside
Week 37 onwards: start, often with a short overlap with the interim
That is roughly nine months from brief to first day. It feels long. But the searches that go wrong are rarely the ones that planned for it. They are the ones that assumed three months and spent the remaining six without anyone in the chair.
