Biglaw

New Partners Tell All: The Inside Scoop On Making Partner In Biglaw

The process can be frustratingly unclear.

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Biglaw firms aren’t always great about sharing information. And the process of becoming partner can be harrowing, made worse by a lack of information. Are you really being considered? Should you be looking for another job? It can all be frustratingly unclear.

Even if folks at your firm are tight-lipped, there are still some ways to garner information. Like the American Lawyer New Partners Survey. The survey compiles information from 400 lawyers promoted to partner in 2015, 2016, or 2017, and lets you know what they really think about the process.

There is some really honest information, like this tidbit from Jai Massari of Davis Polk, who confessed the process was an opaque one:

“You know you’re being considered but can’t do anything about it,” says Massari, a securities and bank regulation lawyer. Even though she had close mentors at the firm in two senior female partners, the crystal ball remained cloudy. “I got positive indications as a sixth- or seventh-year and was getting signals not to accept any other job,” she says, but her promotion “was never clear until the last moment.” Massari, based in Washington, D.C., became an equity partner three months ago.

There are some bright spots — an impressive 88 percent of partners surveyed that said they’d been adequately prepared for partnership. Almost 80 percent said their business development, compensation, and information about their firm’s finances has increased since getting the partnership nod.

However, training and mentorship once you’ve crossed into the promised land of partnership is very uneven. About a third of respondents said they’d received project management training after becoming partner. But if you’re left without training, well, it can be rough. Just take a look at this choice quote from the survey:

“[The] firm appears to promote associates to partner to keep from losing them to competitors. Once promoted, equity partners do little to support them, no longer take time to work with them and mentor them [or] visit with clients,” this partner wrote. “They seem to view new partners as competition rather than resources to be utilized like when they were associates.”

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Cutthroat.

And the bad news is worries about your career don’t stop once you’ve made partner. There are just new benchmarks to hit, and you still might be working without perfect collaboration:

“Job security is still a question mark,” another new partner wrote. Several others took issue with how equity or senior partners refused to share or pass down clients or work in a way that empowered new partners. “We seem to be content tending to our own gardens on the theory that we are judged based on those and less on how the rest of the gardens are growing, or whether we could work together to build a new, bigger garden,” one new partner wrote.

Plus, you know, there’s the whole “state of the industry” concern over a profession slow to change with clients that increasingly demand innovation:

One hit right on the industry’s 1,000-pound gorilla: Asked what most concerns her about her firm, this lawyer responded, “Law firm competition and potential future obsolescence in general.”

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At least it’s better to worry about these issues from the relative safety of inside the partnership than to be on the outside looking in.

The Sometimes Murky Path to Partnership [American Lawyer]

headshotKathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

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