Big Law Recruiter Ordered to Pay $3.6 Million to Former Employer

A Big Law headhunter has been ordered to pay his former employer $3.6 million in damages in a dispute that pulls the curtain back on the lucrative world of recruiting for prominent firms.

A federal judge in Austin, Texas, on Thursday ordered Evan Jowers to pay the award to MWK Recruiting, an Austin-based company now known as Kinney Recruiting. Jowers stole MWK candidates and placed them at firms shortly after leaving the company, MWK alleged in a lawsuit filed in 2018.

The list of firms where Jowers placed lawyers is a “who’s who” of Big Law. It includes Baker McKenzie; DLA Piper; Kirkland & Ellis; Latham & Watkins; Morrison & Foerster; Cooley LLP; Allen & Overy; Covington & Burling; Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher; Linklaters; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; and Weil, Gotshal & Manges.

US District Judge Robert Pitman found that Jowers violated non-compete and non-solicitation deals with MWK, misused trade secrets and failed to fully repay a pair of loans from his former employer.

The court ordered Jowers to pay $3 million for breach of contract, as well as $515,000 for misappropriation of trade secrets, about $42,000 in loans, and attorney fees and interest that have yet to be calculated.

The court listed the damages from each attorney placement, which ranged from highs of more than $400,000 and $250,000 to lower commissions of $45,000 and $56,000. Commissions differ but generally recruiters earn about 25% of a placement’s first-year salary for a successful hire.

Pitman said he would not award damages for placements made at Baker McKenzie and Gunderson Dettmer “as the court found no evidence in the record that Jowers contacted these firms during his last year at MWK.”

Jowers plans to appeal the decision, his lawyer Robert Tauler said.

“It’s double damages,” Tauler, of Los Angeles trial firm Tauler Smith, said in an interview. “He would have to pay back the commissions, and he would have to continue paying on whatever he earned in the future.”

Jowers, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment, testified that the confidential information he gathered from job candidates was based on his personal relationships with them, and that MWK did not tell him to keep information secret.

Pitman, in a 44-page decision, found that the information Jowers gathered on candidates “including their names, their clients, how much their practices were worth, their language skills, their goals for switching firms, and their law school records—constituted MWK’s trade secrets.”

Robert Kinney, MWK and Kinney Recruiting’s CEO, told Bloomberg Law via email that he “offered to settle the whole thing for $700,000 back in 2019.”

“Since then, millions of dollars in attorney and court time has gone into it,” Kinney said. “I credit the court for seeing through all the noise and getting to this verdict.”

Kinney represented himself and MWK in the case, along with Austin lawyer Raymond Mort and New York litigator Tristan Loanzon.

The case is MWK Recruiting Inc. v. Jowers, W.D. Tex., No. 1:18-cv-00444, 9/15/2022.