About Sonja Cotton & Associates
Sonja Cotton & Associates, LLC specializes in the recruitment and placement of legal professionals. Our company was founded in 2003 and is proud to be the leader in the recruiting industry providing top talent for 100’s of law firms and corporate legal departments in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and California.
Our service is second to none. Our highly-trained legal placement specialists welcome any hiring challenge and take pride in assisting our candidates and clients to find the right fit. Along with our extensive database filled with impressive candidates and active referral and recruiting network, our trained legal placement specialists use a personal approach to find a rewarding solution to any legal staffing need.
Our excellence shows in our success. We respect your privacy and recognize confidentiality is the cornerstone of every career search. We take our mission seriously to match the right candidate(s) to open position(s). We search for highly-qualified professionals with specific skills and experience and match these qualifications to our clients’ needs, as well as perform a thorough reference check until we are confident our candidate is exemplary. We pride ourselves in providing an excellent product which is the key to our success.
Our integrity rises above other recruitment companies. Simply put, Sonja Cotton & Associates has high standards and because of this, has earned its reputation as the most trusted legal placement agency capable of handling all of your hiring needs.
Sonja Cotton
Ms. Cotton is Executive Recruiter and Founder of Sonja Cotton & Associates, LLC and has over 25+ years combined legal consulting/recruiting and law firm experience. She opened Sonja Cotton & Associates’ office in 2003 and has since grown her business substantially in the last 15 years to include a national presence. Her prior experience includes a role as an Attorney Recruitment Coordinator overseeing the attorney hiring and law clerk programs for a large downtown Phoenix law firm. She then ventured out of the law firm environment and joined a national recruitment agency where Ms. Cotton gained valuable industry and marketing experience and further honed her negotiation skills to handle most financially-related salary and partner-level transactions. Having now gained both law firm and corporate recruiting experience, she was more than ready to take the next exciting career move in 2000, along with her entrepreneurial spirit, to start her first successful legal placement agency, Biltmore Legal Consultants, as one of four founding partners.
Today, Sonja Cotton & Associates is a solutions-based recruitment agency with over 500+ clients specializing in attorney and legal support staff placements within law firms and corporate legal departments on a temporary or direct hire basis. Due to Ms. Cotton’s diverse and extensive legal career, she has gained tremendous market knowledge, years of consulting experience, and strong community relationships that have groomed her for success. With her combined law firm and corporate training in human resources, the art of negotiating and recruiting, she is a frequent speaker regarding the interview process, marketing, professional branding and current hiring trends in the modern legal market.
Sonja Cotton is originally from the East Coast and has lived in Phoenix, Arizona since 1984. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, yoga, weight lifting, walking her dogs Max and Happy Jack, oil painting large format modern art, and spending quality time with her family.
Lesli Allen
Executive Recruiter and Sales began her recruiting career in 1992 where she worked for a global recruitment firm that placed candidates in both administrative and accounting professions. This experience provided Ms. Allen a solid foundation into the recruiting industry and eventually allowed her to transition into what she loves and does best – utilizing her interpersonal skills to assist candidates and clients to make a career match! Lesli has spent nearly 30 years developing solid relationships with the leaders in Arizona’s premier law firms and is also proud of building an extensive candidate pool. She attributes her success to understanding that the ideal “marriage” between the candidate and employer includes both a top notch skill set along with a great fit into the company culture.
Ms. Allen is highly involved in the Phoenix legal community and is active in a number of legal support associations. She enjoys assisting hiring partners to find highly qualified candidates and is successful in helping members to grow professionally and to also promote new members for these organizations. She continuously strives to educate herself on how to improve hiring and to stay on top of our partner’s ever changing needs. Ms. Allen is currently an active member and past Board member for NALS of Phoenix, Women in eDiscovery, Arizona Paralegal Association and a past member of the Arizona Association of Defense Council.
Ms. Allen understands the importance of being an expert in her field and therefore has obtained several important certifications through the National Association of Personnel Services (NAPS) early on in her career. These include the Certified Personnel Consultant (CPC) and the Certified Temporary Staffing Specialist (CTS) certifications. She was also a Member and Past President of the Arizona Staffing Professionals Association in Arizona.
Recruiting and networking is a 24/7 passion for Ms. Allen and she has made many lifetime friends in the legal community throughout her career! But even though her calendar is very busy with servicing her clients and candidates, Lesli believes in a good life/work balance and still makes time to have fun with her family, pets and friends!