Join a firm that stayed the size it needed to be.
We have never measured growth in headcount. Eleven partners, six counsel, twenty-eight associates — the same scale, roughly, for the better part of a decade, by design.
What you get that a larger firm can't offer.
Seniority From Day One
A partner leads every matter, and associates are given substantive work early — not after two years of document review.
One Office, No Politics of Scale
Everyone is in the same building. Institutional knowledge isn't lost between offices, time zones or practice silos.
Depth Over Breadth
Five practices, no dilution. You build genuine expertise in one area rather than a little knowledge spread across many.
Deliberately unglamorous, most days.
Most days at Mercer & Stone look like disclosure review, drafting, and preparing a partner for a client call — not the courtroom drama the job sometimes gets reduced to elsewhere. We think that's honest, and we'd rather tell candidates that upfront than let them discover it in month two.
What's different here is how early real responsibility arrives. Associates run substantive workstreams within their first year, not because we're understaffed, but because we hire for judgement, not just aptitude, and we'd rather use it early.
Every associate works directly with a partner on every matter — there is no layer of mid-level supervision standing between junior lawyers and the people making the strategic calls. That's a deliberate structural choice, not a side effect of being a smaller firm.
Across all five practices.
A deliberately short process.
- 01
Introductory conversation
A direct conversation with a partner in the relevant practice — not a recruiter reading from a script.
- 02
Case study discussion
A working discussion of a real (anonymised) matter, to understand how you reason through a problem, not just what you know.
- 03
Meet the team
Time with the associates and counsel you'd actually work alongside, without partners in the room.
- 04
Offer & conversation with the Senior Partner
Every offer at every level includes a direct conversation with Charles Stone. We think that matters.
We hire selectively, and rarely against a live vacancy list.
If the description above sounds like the way you want to practise, we'd rather hear from you directly than wait for a role to be advertised.
Contact Our Recruitment Team