C&M Legal Search stopped losing track of its candidates and rebuilt its back-office on Tracker

“I’d recommend Tracker every time.  Zero regrets.”
Nicole Wong, VP of Strategy & Recruiting Operations, C&M Legal Search 

C&M Legal Search has spent over a decade building a reputation in a single, specialized lane: legal staffing. Direct hire, temp, and contract; staff level up through attorney and counsel, for law firms and corporate in-house legal departments. Running a specialty this focused meant the firm eventually outgrew the patchwork of tools it had leaned on to get there. Here’s how they moved onto one platform, what changed in the back office, and why support has been core to the experience ever since. 

C&M Legal Search at a glance 

When a legal staffing ATS stops scaling with your business 

C&M started in the eDiscovery space, a niche most people find inside a law firm rather than outside one. From there, the firm branched into staff-level and attorney-level recruiting, then into corporate in-house legal, covering both direct hire and temp/contract along the way. 

Growth like that puts pressure on the tech underneath it. C&M had already been through one ATS platform before landing on its second, a lightweight system called CATS. CATS worked fine as a place to store candidate, job, and client information. It didn’t do much else. 

“It was really just good at housing information, and maybe pulling it back,” said Nicole Wong, VP of Strategy & Recruiting Operations at C&M Legal Search. “As we got into the temp and contract space, we needed to track and record things like placements and timesheets. That’s what led us to Tracker.” 

Placement tracking, recruiter splits, temp time management, invoicing, sequences for BD outreach: none of them existed in CATS. C&M was already outgrowing the system well before making the switch. The question wasn’t really whether to move on. It was when. 

Consolidating recruiting tools into one system of record 

Before Tracker, C&M’s stack looked like this: 

• CATS as the ATS, housing candidate, job, and client records only 
• ADP for temp employee timesheets, with no connection back to the ATS 
• QuickBooks for invoicing, entered manually after every placement 
• Constant Contact for client newsletters, with no way to pull send lists from CATS or log replies back to a contact record 

None of these systems talked to each other. Every placement meant re-entering the same information two or three times, then reconciling it all by hand. 

“There’s always potential for error when you have too many systems and too many hands involved, doing things manually,” Nicole said. “We used to see incorrect numbers on an invoice, or incorrect time coming through. We don’t run into that anymore, because we’re getting it right from the source of truth.“ 

Today, Tracker is that source of truth. QuickBooks is still in the mix for accounting, but invoices now generate and send directly from Tracker, then sync over. 

Back-office automation for legal recruiters 

This is where C&M felt the switch the most. 

Before Tracker, every pay period meant a multi-day manual push: exporting timesheets, emailing client approvers, chasing candidates who hadn’t logged their hours. Nicole estimated the process took at least one morning, with two days of lead-up beforehand just to get everyone’s time submitted and approved. 

“Now there’s just automatic reminders. A couple of clicks in Tracker and it goes out, approve or don’t approve, to both the candidate and the client approver. It doesn’t have to start that early anymore.” 

Reporting saw a similar shift. Nicole used to hand-build reports by manually copying data out of CATS. Tracker compiles that same information automatically. 

C&M’s back-office team has grown from two people to three. That’s tied directly to the firm building its temp and contract division, which brings real additional work of its own: timesheets, approvals, and invoicing at higher volume. Tracker’s automations meant that growth didn’t require adding heads on top of it. The team scaled with the new business line, not with manual busy work. 

Recruitment marketing and BD tools, built in 

C&M’s client newsletter used to run through Constant Contact, a tool that had no connection to CATS at all. Send lists had to be built by hand; replies had to be manually logged back into candidate and client records one at a time, and there was no easy way to see whether a campaign was actually working. 

“I can build my list, build my newsletter, schedule it as a campaign, and see all the opens, clicks, and bounces in one spot, directly on that contact,” Nicole said. “I’m not jumping back and forth anymore.” 

On the business development side, the team previously ran through manual calendar reminders and Gmail, and are now utilizing Tracker’s sequencing feature. Recruiters set their steps, intervals, and messaging once, and the system automatically pauses a sequence the moment a candidate or contact replies. 

A candidate database built for repeat placements 

Before Tracker, C&M’s early ATS couldn’t reactivate candidates at all, a real limitation in a business where speed to fill often depends on going back to people you’ve already placed or spoken with. 

Tracker’s candidate search closed that gap, including one filter Nicole called out unprompted as a genuine differentiator: the ability to search by furthest status achieved, surfacing candidates who made it to a specific stage (interview, offer, and so on) on past jobs, even after that job closed. 

“That’s a gold mine,” Nicole said. “In our old system you had to click into every candidate’s profile to figure that out. In Tracker it’s incredibly clear how far someone got before a job closed out.” 

That kind of reactivation also plays into cost. LinkedIn InMail pricing has climbed and being able to pull qualified candidates back from an existing database, rather than sourcing new ones from scratch, is a direct hedge against that cost. 

Support that doesn’t give up 

Ask Nicole what sets Tracker apart, and she doesn’t lead with a feature. She leads with the support team. 

She needed a way to see the last time a given recruiter had reached out to a contact, without clicking into every individual record to find it, something CATS made borderline impossible. The request took real back-and-forth to get right, but the team nailed it down because they stayed dedicated to solving it. 

“At no point did the support team say we can’t do that,” Nicole said. “They spent months on it and got me to a solution I use on a regular basis. That’s been my experience the whole way through, from our transition off the old ATS to today.” 

That same pattern showed up when Tracker’s LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect went live. Early in the rollout, C&M ran into a bug where candidate ownership was being applied incorrectly on sync, a real problem for a team of recruiters who depend on clear ownership to avoid stepping on each other’s relationships. Nicole and her recruiters flagged it, support tracked it, and the team communicated each patch as it rolled out until it was resolved. 

“The worst thing they can say is no,” Nicole said. “And even then, it goes in as a feature request.” 

Looking ahead 

Nicole’s already thinking past what Tracker does today. She’s been asking her account manager about EVA, Tracker’s AI assistant, and the agents rolling out alongside it for tasks like resume scrubbing and screening. 

“Tracker is doing that, and Tracker is staying ahead of what’s happening,” Nicole said. “Eva rolling out is going to be an absolute game changer for us. It’s going to completely change how we search in the system and how we’re able to bring back candidates and match candidates to jobs, quickly.” 

What C&M would tell another legal staffing firm 

Asked what she’d tell another specialty staffing firm still running on disconnected tools, Nicole didn’t hesitate: 

“There’s real value in having all, or at least most, of your tools consolidated in one place. It opens up visibility across the company and reduces the potential for errors between systems.” 

And asked directly how she’d compare Tracker against the other platforms she evaluated: 

“I’d recommend Tracker every time. We were down to Bullhorn and Tracker at the end of my vetting process, and we landed on Tracker. Zero regrets. I wouldn’t look back at all.” 

Want to see what Tracker’s back office and marketing automation could do for your firm? Get a demo. 

Marketer in the Staffing and recruiting industry for over 6 years with a passion for building relationships and educating staffing professionals with industry best practices.

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