Strengthening Global Legal Leadership for a Medical Technology Company

A global medical technology company engaged MLA initially for a senior legal search but faced challenges attracting external talent due to compensation, equity, and location constraints. Over time, MLA’s role expanded beyond search execution to include ongoing advisory support, providing benchmarking data and market insight that informed key adjustments to the company’s talent strategy.

• Relationship evolved from individual searches to a master services agreement (MSA), establishing MLA as a preferred search partner
• Advisory support included compensation benchmarking, role structuring, and market intelligence
• Adjustments to compensation and equity improved competitiveness for senior legal talent
• Ongoing global searches draw from an international candidate pool with increased flexibility
• Long-term relationship strengthened through continuity with internal stakeholders advancing into leadership roles

The Challenge

A global medical technology company was contending with increasing complexity driven by organizational change, rising compliance expectations, and operations spanning multiple jurisdictions. The legal team had a strong culture of developing talent from within, but increasingly found itself under-resourced when it came to attracting senior external candidates for specialist and leadership roles. Early searches exposed the underlying tension. Compensation and equity structures weren’t keeping pace with market benchmarks, and certain positions carried a specific U.S. location requirement that narrowed the available pool further. Legal leadership recognized that closing the gap on external talent required more than a revised job description, it required a clearer view of the market itself.

The Solution

MLA’s engagement began as search execution and evolved, fairly quickly, into something more substantive. The first mandate covered a senior legal hire for the company’s Americas business. Candidate interest was constrained by the compensation and location factors already in play, but the process generated clear, data‑grounded insight into market expectations and competitor positioning. From there, MLA supported a broader range of searches across commercial, compliance, and leadership functions. Alongside the search work, the firm provided ongoing advisory input, compensation and equity benchmarking, analysis of candidate availability and geographic flexibility, guidance on role design, and counsel on navigating internal referrals and stakeholder dynamics. As the relationship deepened and legal leadership evolved across the organization, MLA and the client formalized the partnership through a master services agreement. The MSA established a streamlined framework for future engagements: pre-negotiated terms, simplified statements of work, all without sacrificing the flexibility the client needed for a varied and global mandate.

The Result

The MSA established MLA as a preferred search partner for legal hiring across the U.S. and globally. Informed by MLA’s benchmarking work, the company made targeted adjustments to its compensation and equity approach, changes that improved its ability to compete for senior legal talent. The relationship evolved from transactional search support into a long‑term advisory partnership grounded in continuity and trust. It is sustained, in part, by contacts who came up through the organization and, over time, found themselves on the other side of the hiring conversation.