Agency Capture: Partnership

With no decent analogue to “making partner,” we are left without an easy shorthand for career ascension for government attorneys.

“She made partner.”

My point today is a simple one: you never “make partner” in the government, either literally or functionally. There is no ready analogue to partnership for government attorneys, and certainly not one that is as broadly understood.

It is a ubiquitous expression, certainly within our profession and to some degree in the broader culture. “Make partner.” Ask someone who means to make a career out of Biglaw what they are shooting for, and the answer is probably something along the lines of “make partner.”

It is ubiquitous because it so neatly communicates all that we associate with partnership, particularly in Biglaw. Upon hearing that someone is a partner, we know at once that this person is powerful, established, and moneyed. This is a person that owns some piece of a profitable and sophisticated enterprise. We immediately think this person is at minimum a competent and experienced lawyer, perhaps even a strong one. A partner has proven to her peers that she is good at doing legal work, managing others that do legal work, and growing a base of clients who will provide more legal work to the firm. She has done this with sufficient clarity that a group of established and interested people, who stand to gain or lose money by how effectively they govern the enterprise they own, have elected to offer this person some ownership of the enterprise in the belief that doing so will grow their own personal and collective bottom line. That is a stamp, a vote of confidence from peers of some standing. While not necessarily always master of the universe, a partner has attained a high degree of professional standing that is broadly recognized and understood.

Partnership requires many skills, of course: business development and managing client relationships, managing subordinate attorneys, strategic planning, and of course a partner must maintain a very high level of quality in his or her own legal work. And a partner’s strengths may vary: some partners are better lawyers than others; some are better at business development than others; some are better managers than others. But the term, the mere application of the label, implies this person has risen to or surpassed a fairly high level of quality relative to most lawyers. We generally understand the least common denominator of partnership to be a high one.

On its face, it is unsurprising that we never say “he made partner” about career government attorneys. After all, partnership is a distinctly private-sector phenomenon, especially to the extent it denotes ownership of an enterprise, and the riches this often implies.

But what’s interesting is we have no analogous level of career attainment to refer to for attorneys in the public sector. And even if such a thing existed, there is certainly no term that so perfectly conveys the status to others, both within and outside the profession.

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Let’s put compensation level aside. Obviously no government employee expects compensation even remotely comparable to what a full equity partner at a heavily levered Biglaw firm will be taking home.

A government attorney of sufficient quality that he would have been a candidate for partner someday if he had chosen to work in the private sector might be promoted, of course. This promotion could be reflected through increased substantive responsibility, in which case this attorney might find himself being assigned a number of the most important or complex matters handled by the office. Before long, this attorney will have primary responsibility on a number of matters of great significance, perhaps arguing before federal appellate courts on a regular basis. Or perhaps this person has an interest in management, and the promotion takes the form of moving up the org chart a bit. This attorney will eventually find herself overseeing a broad range of matters and potentially supervising a large number of other attorneys, all of whom are working in an area of substantive law of great public significance.

In either hypothetical case, I think it is fair to say the government attorney has reached a very high degree of career attainment. Both attorneys are doing complex legal work of great significance. But if asked to summarize his or her professional status, all they can say is, “I’m a lawyer at the Justice Department” or maybe “I’m a managing attorney at Agency X.” Whereas the Biglaw partner can simply say, “I’m a partner at Moneydollars LLP.”

The only remotely comparable status that I can think of is elevation to the career Senior Executive Service (SES). Simply put, the SES is the top of the career federal civil service.

But while ascending to the SES is a profound “stamp” for a career civil servant, it still isn’t a great analogue to partnership.  For one thing, the SES is not as broadly understood as “making partner.”

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For another, the timeline to reach the career SES is extremely long. I acknowledge that partnership is more elusive than ever. The current narrative is that equity in large firms is concentrating, and has been since the financial crisis, which means partnership is much harder to attain. Sometimes, this even means partnership is flatly not possible for reasons having nothing to do with an individual attorney’s quality. But this particular drama is played out over eight to 10 years, and if an attorney isn’t elected partner, she can explore other options in the private sector. By contrast, ascending to the SES usually takes closer to 30 years than 10. But even more importantly, the specialized nature of some government work means an attorney might only be a realistic candidate for one or two SES jobs government-wide, which might only come open once or twice during the course of that attorney’s career.

Against this backdrop, are we really able to say that any government attorney that doesn’t ascend to the SES is generally of no higher professional status than an associate?

With no decent analogue to “making partner,” we are left without an easy shorthand for career ascension for government attorneys. This makes it harder to communicate your career status to the market, of course, but there is an upside as well. A government attorney is freed up from evaluating every success by making partner, or not. Maybe this makes it easier to view the work as an end, in and of itself.


Brian D. Griffin began his legal career as an associate in the New York office of a Biglaw firm, focusing mostly on litigation. He is currently a staff attorney in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Office of General Counsel. His duties include litigation, rulemaking, and programmatic legal advice. Brian attended New York University School of Law and Georgetown University for undergraduate, majoring in Government. You can reach him at BGriffin8134@gmail.com.

DISCLAIMER: The statements and views expressed in this column are entirely Griffin’s own. They do not represent the views of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States.