Our Team

Amy Hancock is the firm’s Director of Legal Talent and HR. Amy’s 20-plus-year AMLaw 100 law firm career has been focused on recruiting and maximizing the development and value of the talent capital of her firm’s attorneys and has spanned all areas of an attorney’s career progression and life cycle, including but not limited to: recruiting, orientation and integration, training, lawyer mentoring, development and retention (career counseling, work allocation/utilization, performance appraisals/evaluations, promotion-to-partnership), pro bono, alumni engagement, and diversity and inclusion initiatives. She is a nationally-known public speaker, author and leader in the Attorney Recruiting and Professional Development industry.

Working strategically with firm leadership, she is responsible for the recruitment, development, retention and overall talent management of the attorneys and service professionals at the firm. Amy plans, designs, and implements training, continuing legal education, orientation, integration, mentoring, and career counseling programs for our attorneys and identifies associate-attorney concerns relating to development, compensation, quality-of-life, work, and other employment (and human resource)-related issues. In her attorney coaching and counseling role she assists the firm’s attorneys by serving as somewhat of an ombuds person and trusted, interpersonal, communication link between law firm leadership and the firm’s non-partner attorneys.

In addition to her Attorney Professional Development work, Amy is also responsible for attorney employment, diversity, and alumni initiatives and oversees recruiting efforts that include recruiting on law school campuses as well as the strategic identification and hiring of lateral attorneys. She has experience tying recruiting evaluation tools to the evaluation tools utilized by firm attorneys in annual evaluation processes, developing behavioral interviewing tools that have increased the successful hiring and retention of attorneys and developing and administering successful summer associate programs. She has also developed and implemented a Lateral Hire Integration Program (which aims to ease the organizational transitions lateral practitioners may experience when joining a firm from another law firm, after serving as a judicial clerk, or being in the legal department at a business or company) and an Implicit Bias Training Program (which included an extensive review of recruiting and attorney evaluation processes to mitigate for implicit biases found within each and to implement bias “interrupters” to better control how bias is acted upon in the workplace).

Amy is also the co-founder/developer and faculty-speaker for several professional development curriculums and other training programs designed to ensure law students are taught business and other professional development skills to successfully distinguish them in the legal marketplace. She delivers these programs to law students on many of the firm’s talent-pipeline, feeder recruiting campuses such as The University of Texas School of Law (she co-developed the inaugural “Prepared-to-Practice” Institute), The University of Houston Law Center (she co-developed the mandatory “Passport to Success” program for 1L students), and Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law (where she was a faculty speaker for their Career Foundations & Professional Development – Professionalism Summit and participated in their “OCI Bootcamp” informational panel). She is also an Adjunct Professor for the Legal Externship Program at The University of Houston Law Center, which allows students to experience and reflect upon the law-in-practice through field placements with the judiciary, nonprofit institutions and government agencies that provide substantial lawyering experiences that are reasonably similar to the experience of a lawyer advising or representing a client (or engaging in other lawyering tasks).

She holds a B.A. with high honors from The University of Texas at Austin, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and a J.D. from The University of Texas School of Law. She is a published author and frequently featured speaker at local, national, and international conferences on various attorney professional development and recruiting topics and has served as a board member and Chair of the preeminent, international attorney professional development organization, The Professional Development Consortium, (www.pdclegal.org), an organization which currently has over 750 members who are charged with leading attorney recruiting and development initiatives in law firms, law schools, and other professional service firms.

During law school, Amy was elected to The Order of Barristers and was the Public Relations and Judging Director of the Board of Advocates, sat on the Career Services and Trial Advocacy Faculty-Selected Committees, was an elected member of the Student Bar Association, was a national mock trial participant and winner, was a Texas Law Fellowship recipient, and served as the Law Day Coordinator for the Student Recruitment and Orientation Committee.

JUDICIAL CLERKSHIP

REPRESENTATIVE EXPERIENCE

MEMBERSHIPS

OTHER

NEWS

SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS/EVENTS

PUBLICATIONS

ADMISSIONS

EDUCATION