8 The Challenge of the ‘Quite Good’ Partner

 

All partners in a law firm are equal, but some are more equal than others, to freely cite George Orwell. When discussing compensation the attention invariably goes to the top-earners. The superstars only represent a small percentage of all partners. At the other end of the spectrum there are the underperformers trailing notably behind. Underperformers also attract a lot of attention. The large cohort of very good partners in between the extremes go largely unnoticed. These days ‘quite good’ is seemingly not good enough.

At TGO Consulting we have developed the Power Curve©. This is a model we use to assess vulnerabilities in succession and leadership at a law firm. To draw a Power Curve© we take into account a multitude of data points, including revenue, management roles, influence within the partnership and client guide rankings. Looking at these four criteria alone, even the managing partner does not necessarily have a high Power Score, as he or she could be low on revenue and client guide ranking. Typically in most firms it is the high earners that have the most power, even without any formal management role.

 

The outstanding partners are by definition a small group. Even if by objective measures all partners would be outstanding, a small number would still stand out from the others by being even more successful. What defines being outstanding is primarily measured against the other partners in the firm and to some extent against the market. Top-performers make up perhaps 10% of the partner group, but they have an outsized influence on leadership, strategy and compensation. So where does this leave the large cohort of rank-and-file partners who have good performance but still fall short of the superstars? In the typical spread of performance in a law firm they form roughly 80% of the partnership. It is wrong to call them ‘average’, even though this is true as a mathematical exercise. How are law firms to look after the merely very competent? We ask because the industry is in danger of over-rewarding an inspired few. We are witnessing the falling status of those just one or two notches down from the most sought-after. Highly skilled, reliable practitioners who manage significant caseloads or service the cases of other partners: they form the engine room of the firm.

The best firms in any market are not defined by their stars. All firms of a certain calibre have a few stars. What distinguishes the firms that hold market leadership over decades is the average quality of their lawyers and the consistent investment made in raising that average over time. A firm with a handful of exceptional partners and a mediocre engine room is inherently unstable. Its success is concentrated in people who can leave, and when they do, the firm discovers that the foundation beneath them was never as strong as it appeared. Constantly investing in the quality of the whole partnership is the only strategy that compounds.

 

War for talent

Fundamentally the legal industry has always been about talent. Having said that, for a couple of decades it was equally about volume. Until the 2000s, due diligence required teams of junior associates to sit in data rooms, literally locked rooms filled with thousands of banker boxes full of papers. Being part of a due diligence team did not require extraordinary talent. The same could be said for leverage in general. For a long time, employing large teams of associates on a matter was the industry practice for generating revenue. Technology has largely made these volume-based models obsolete and the industry is once again focusing on talent.

At the time of writing, early 2026, the war for talent is fully under way. For the AmLaw 100 elite the gloves are off and there is aggressive lateral hiring of talent, coming with increasingly exuberant pay packages. Similar trends are observed in AI and in finance, where $100 million pay packages for ‘rare talent’ are no longer rarities[1]. The legal industry is not quite there yet, but is certainly moving in the same direction. This financially powered war for talent forces law firms to increase the compensation of the talent they definitely do not want to lose. Freshfields, for example, saw their profits fall to GBP 656.8 million despite a 6% increase in revenue over the same period[2]. This was largely caused by the increase in associate compensation. By the end of 2025, law firms seemed to be competing on who was paying the highest salaries and bonuses.

In this war for talent the market is over-rewarding an inspired few. This implies a falling status and stagnating income for those who are just one notch down from the most sought-after, the 80%. If the top-performers get extraordinary compensation and expensive laterals are brought in, it is in the end the rank-and-file partners who pay for all this. The cost falls on the people who cannot leave without destabilising the firm, which means effectively they have no choice but to absorb it. Law firms are relying on their good, but not exceptional, partners to support their growth strategy while systematically under-investing in them.

The irony is visible in partner meetings. The same managing partners who express concern about the firm’s long-term talent pipeline will, when forced to choose between funding a training programme and topping up the compensation of a restless star, choose the latter every time. They are not wrong to be worried about losing the star. But the cumulative cost of never choosing the training programme is a partnership that grows steadily less capable of developing stars of its own.

 

Catch-22

The rank-and-file partners have little choice in this arrangement. If the top talents are unhappy they might leave the firm as they are easily employable and in high demand, and this could trigger the firm’s collapse. Reputable institutions like Shearman & Sterling, Stroock & Stroock & Lavan and Cadwalader were recently forced into mergers to avoid exactly this outcome.

Why could the departure of a handful of partners trigger the collapse of an entire firm? The mechanics are simple. If top partners start leaving, two things happen. First, profitability drops. Even though top partners are highly compensated, they still contribute more than they take. They cover their share of fixed costs and generate surplus profit for everyone else. Take an imaginary New York superstar generating revenue of $100 million while receiving $30 million in compensation. If the firm has a profit margin of 50%, this partner creates $20 million in profit for the other partners. In practice the figure will be even higher, because the costs directly associated with this partner’s practice are considerably less than 50%. The rank-and-file partners have a direct personal financial interest in not losing the top-performer.

Second, the reputation of the firm takes a hit. If the top M&A partner or Finance partner leaves, it shakes the market’s confidence. When a whole team decamps to a competitor, the firm might lose its tier-1 position in that area. Some of the remaining partners and talented associates will then start to question whether the firm is still the right platform. Some will leave to avoid becoming part of a sinking ship. Before long it becomes very hard to stop the bleeding. This is exactly what happened at Shearman, Stroock and Cadwalader, and it has happened to firms before and will happen again. Law firms are intrinsically unstable organisations. They seem stable until a tipping point, after which they are prone to collapse.

Seen from this perspective the rank-and-file partners have little choice but to accept what the top-performers demand in order to stay. That does not mean the arrangement is in the firm’s long-term interest. It means the firm has been captured by the logic of short-term retention. The two are not the same thing.

 

Rank and file is not what it used to be

From the above it may seem the top-performers always have the upper hand and the rank-and-file partners just have to suck it up. Fortunately the reality tends to be more nuanced than that. Yes, the top partner has a strong hand when it comes to profit and reputation, but the other partners have the power of numbers. When it comes to voting, they form the majority. No top-performer is irreplaceable. It might be expensive but there are always alternative options. There have been situations where the partners successfully voted the top-performer out, and being expelled from a firm is not good for a partner’s market value. Legendary management guru Tom Peters departed from McKinsey in 1981 in circumstances that remain contested, for not adhering to the culture of the firm. Both he and the firm have done very well since, to illustrate that you can survive firing a rock star.

As profits grew exponentially over the past decade or two, the demands on partners have risen at a similar pace. What was accepted as a quite good partner twenty years ago would almost certainly not make the cut today. In my time with law firms I have observed the effects of rising performance expectations, international competition and law firms becoming businesses, from close up. I have seen partners who expected to remain with their firm until retirement being forced out because standards were being raised. This process of raising the bar has continued. Today’s rank-and-file partners are on average much better than those of twenty years ago. This evolution will likely accelerate as plain vanilla work gets largely automated.

Assuming that someone is a partner for around thirty years, this dynamic has immediate consequences for any partner who still has ten or more years to go. Those who are not already superstars will need to get a lot better in the years to come. This creates a paradox. The rank-and-file partners form the vast majority and establish the average, so they cannot by definition be underperformers, and yet they will have to do better to remain a genuine asset for the firm in the future. If everything becomes better, you will go backward by remaining the same. The quite good partner of today might be the not-so-good partner of tomorrow. This is not a comfortable thought, but it is an honest one.

 

The importance of the quite good partner

Every law firm needs rank-and-file partners to function. Partners that are very competent, but still one or two notches below the superstars. Every law firm has them and it is always around 80%. Kirkland & Ellis has over 1,600 partners globally, of which about 500 are ranked and only roughly 60 are ranked tier-1 by Chambers. The same metrics apply to any other blue-chip law firm. And yes, a tier-1 Chambers ranking does not automatically equal financial outperformance, but it is at least some form of measure to illustrate the point that no firm can have only superstars.

The fact is that the superstars need the rank-and-file partners to keep the firm running. These are the partners prepared to sit on committees, available for student recruitment, the backbone of the firm. They are also the partners needed to support the superstar’s practice, because without proper infrastructure no superstar can function. The legal industry is teamwork par excellence. I am not aware of solo practitioners or one-partner law firms that have made it to the top. It is not the superstars that are the platform. It is the rank-and-file partners.

When discussing compensation, most attention goes to the superstars. When money is needed to increase their compensation it will be taken from the other partners. We already explained the catch-22 mechanism that keeps rank-and-file partners effectively as hostages of the top performers. Even if it seems that they have no choice but to grin and bear it, firms should spend a great deal of attention on keeping the rank-and-file partners fairly compensated and genuinely involved in the strategy of the firm. The alternative, a partnership in which the 80% feel that they are funding the 10% while being excluded from meaningful influence, is a slow way to hollow out the institution.

The best test of whether a firm is genuinely investing in its engine room is simple: ask the rank-and-file partners whether they believe the firm’s strategy is being designed with them in mind. In the firms we work with that consistently outperform their peers over five and ten-year periods, the answer to that question is yes. In the firms that underperform despite having excellent top earners, the answer is almost always no.

 

Global competition

The quite good will always prosper in lines of work that are site-specific and therefore somewhat screened from global competition. Being a partner at a national elite firm in a smaller economy comes with a terrific income and a high social status. It is easy to understand why partners feel they are doing great and in fact they are, compared to most others. The fact is that the legal industry is becoming increasingly international and will be even more so in the future. Partners should not compare themselves with national competition but with the international.

The elite law firms have increased their footprint by opening offices and by being involved in high-value cross-border mandates. The norm of what constitutes a quite good partner or an outstanding partner is increasingly being set at an international level, as the world’s best lawyers and law firms compete for the most valuable mandates across markets. Establishing what is quite good and what is outstanding has become an international calculation. The high-end of the legal industry is no longer confined to borders. A partner at a leading firm in Warsaw, Prague or Lagos competes for the top mandates in their market not against the firm across the street, but against the standard being set in London and New York.

 

Developing the potential

The engine room partners are often neglected and taken for granted. It is the superstars and the non-performers who absorb most of the attention and energy. While I understand the need to accommodate and enable the superstars in order to keep them happy and at their best, and I subscribe to the necessity of managing poor performers, I think it is equally a mistake to ignore the 80%. These are the partners who carry the culture of the firm and provide a steady stream of revenue. This is the group of partners firms need to invest in more.

There has long been a debate in organisational research about whether the all-star team or the balanced team delivers the best performance. McKinsey & Company popularised the war-for-talent thesis in the late 1990s, arguing that organisations should obsessively pursue exceptional individuals, the so-called A-players[3]. The belief was that if you hire the smartest, the fastest and the most aggressive, their individual outputs will sum to a superior total. This logic drove an entire generation of hiring decisions across professional services.

The evidence from high-performance environments suggests this is only partially true. Research on NBA and football teams found that while adding top talent initially improves performance, there is a tipping point where the marginal benefit of another superstar becomes negative. This is particularly true in activities that require high levels of coordination, which is exactly what complex legal work is. When too many superstars compete for dominance within the same group, coordination breaks down. The legal equivalent: a litigation team where every partner wants to argue the main point, cross-examine the key witness and be named first in the judgement tends to do none of these things well.

Boris Groysberg’s research at Harvard Business School makes a related point. His studies on star analysts and lawyers suggest that superstar status is often more firm-specific than individual. When a firm hires a superstar from a rival, that partner’s performance often drops sharply, not because they have lost their talent, but because they have left behind the infrastructure, the team relationships and the institutional knowledge that made their talent productive. Superstars who move with their full team suffer less, which suggests the star and their supporting cast are more interdependent than either side likes to admit. The superstar who believes their portable book of business is entirely their own creation should spend a moment thinking about how it would have developed without the brand, the associates, the back-office and the reputation of the firm behind them.

The research of Thomas DeLong and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan from Harvard Business School makes the same point from the other direction. Their article ‘Let’s Hear It for B Players’ argues that firms’ long-term performance depends far more on their solid, reliable partners than on their headline-grabbing superstars. The B-player tier term, for what I call the engine room partner, is not average. They are highly competent professionals who lack the relentless need for the limelight. Unlike superstars, who often view their stay at a firm as a temporary alliance for mutual gain, these partners are organisational citizens: loyal to the institution, willing to put the firm’s health above their own personal brand, and consistently reliable in ways that superstar partners often are not.

The trap that firms fall into, as DeLong and Vijayaraghavan describe it, is that because B-players are low-maintenance and self-sufficient, management ignores them in favour of coddling high-maintenance superstars. When B-players feel undervalued or overlooked, they do not typically make demands. They disengage, or quietly leave. Because they are the holders of institutional memory and the primary mentors to junior talent, their quiet departure is often more damaging to the long-term health of a firm than the high-profile exit of a superstar. The superstar’s departure produces a crisis that everyone can see. The engine room partner’s departure produces a slow deterioration that nobody notices until it is already entrenched.

Translated to football, Arsenal’s average player is probably better than Liverpool’s average player, but Liverpool’s elite few trump Arsenal’s elite few[4]. This is a contest between two different recruitment strategies and, arguably, two contrasting worldviews. I am not a football person, and I am aware that athletes and lawyers are not the same. But strategically the Arsenal approach appeals more to me when it comes to the legal industry. The Nietzschean idea of the Übermensch, which is very much at home in American culture and in the American legal market, produces impressive individuals who can generate extraordinary short-term results. It is less good at producing institutions that last.

Superstar lawyers are a volatile possession. They have high market value and can move to another firm at any moment. Unlike football, where a player can only transfer at certain predefined windows, a rainmaker can leave with immediate effect. Having a strong team surrounding the superstars would dampen the impact of such a departure. Besides, most superstar lawyers prefer to work in a high-achieving environment; that is where they thrive. And for their practice it is essential that all other partners have a great reputation. I have known a partner at a leading firm who referred matters to a competitor because he was convinced his fellow partners were not up to standard. An extreme example, but it is the direction firms want to avoid.

Although I admire Nietzsche and think Also sprach Zarathustra is among his finest works, I do not subscribe to the Übermensch concept as it is applied in today’s popular business culture. Translated to the legal industry, I am a firm believer in developing the best possible quality across the entire team, not only focusing on keeping and acquiring superstar partners, but putting real energy, resources and attention into developing the 80%.

Such structural development has several elements: recruiting for future-proof talent and training from day one for the top, not merely for the work that needs to get done; creating and maintaining a firm-wide culture of outstanding performance, with clear consequences when the bar is not met; eliminating political compromise from partner appointments so that only the very best get promoted; structured career-long learning and development from day one as a junior through to the moment of retirement as a partner; and a compensation system that includes recognition of development, not only of last year’s revenue.

 

Recruitment and training

Law firms have always tried to recruit the best available talent from university. At the same time there has always been the reality of vacancies that need to be filled. If the business model is selling hours at a mark-up, more utilised individuals mean more revenue and higher profit. Sometimes law firms are so desperate for people that they inevitably compromise on quality. The starter question would be: what defines quality in the first place?

Traditionally law firms relied on top universities combined with high grades and the right family and cultural background. Whether this has ever been the right approach is debatable, but certainly with the emergence of AI it urgently needs to be reconsidered. With AI the industry will need fewer hands to do the work, and the emphasis on legal knowledge will diminish. As technology augments the lawyer it becomes a great equaliser, since any lawyer can buy access to the same tools. If basic legal knowledge is no longer the differentiator, lawyers will have to hone other skills and attributes to stand out and succeed. This is discussed in depth in Chapter 4 on the 7-Core Dimensions©.

These implications are direct for recruitment and training. Both need to give the 7-Core Dimensions© a central role in assessment and development. In the future law firms should not be looking for technical or academic legal minds, but for graduates who are creative, have a good understanding of the world and the economy, and have outstanding people skills. These skills and attributes, just like legal experience, need to be further developed at the firm. By selecting on different criteria and being more strict at the gate, the average quality of the associates will grow over time. This in turn will help raise the future partner level. A firm that selects purely on academic achievement and billable capacity will fill up with technically capable people who cannot originate, cannot read the room in a client meeting, and have no idea what their clients’ businesses actually do. That is not a description of the talent the future legal market will reward.

 

High performance culture

Contrary to common belief, not all law firms have a high-performance culture or mindset. Yes, they occasionally work long hours, but that is not the same thing. High-performance culture refers to a will and a mission to always outperform: providing the best possible service to clients, being disciplined, well organised and well prepared, even when it comes to internal meetings. It basically amounts to being genuinely professional.

There are many lawyers who claim artistic freedom as an argument for not acting in a disciplined professional manner. This shows in their ambition towards clients and competitors, and in how prepared and organised they are when it comes to internal matters. In this book we have talked about ambition as a potentially divisive force within a firm. If the ambition gap becomes too wide, top-performers will start doubting the validity of the platform. Running a top law firm is not only about revenue and reputation, it is equally about a shared level of ambition. Maintaining a high-performance culture across the entire firm, meaning all partners, associates and staff, is a key factor in success. For creating, growing and maintaining such a culture, the rank-and-file partners are crucial. They set the tone. The superstars are too visible and too volatile to be its custodians. The engine room partners carry it.

This is also why the compensation system matters so much in this chapter. A firm that pays exclusively for revenue generated this year tells its partners, through the only language that is heard consistently and clearly, that nothing else is valued. The partner who mentors three young lawyers through their first difficult matters, who serves on a committee that nobody wants to chair, who stays late not because a client demanded it but because a colleague needed help, that partner and the firm’s compensation formula are operating in different realities. Closing that gap is not a soft goal. It is a prerequisite for the kind of culture that sustains a high-performance law firm over the long term.

 

Team over individual

For a law firm to achieve more and become more successful, it helps enormously if everyone rallies around a shared purpose. Individual responsibility is ingrained in the lawyer’s mindset. It is the partner handling the matter who bears professional liability if mistakes happen, and ultimately partners have individual targets for origination and revenue. And yet teamwork is in the interest of the firm. Most blue-chip clients do not hire individual lawyers. What they engage is the reputation of the brand, in the expectation that they will get access to the entire range of talent, contacts and experience. For this to happen, partners need to exit their silos and become more genuinely collaborative.

There is a concept we work with which we call swarm intelligence. Behind it is research showing how much smarter an organisation becomes when it succeeds in combining its collective knowledge, experience and creativity rather than leaving these trapped in individual practices and practice groups. Those firms that are able to tap into what is available across the partnership will be the firms that outperform their peers. I know firsthand of a premier AmLaw 100 firm where partners routinely consult the wider partner group for insights and ideas on how to tackle a matter. This firm competes among the very best law firms in the world and they know that using swarm intelligence gives them an edge. The side effect is that knowledge and experience proliferate throughout the firm, making everyone smarter over time.

Teamwork and swarm intelligence are powerful tools for growing stronger as a firm by continuously lifting the level of the engine room partners. A well-functioning team does not need every member to be a superstar. It needs every member to perform their role at the highest level and to make the players around them more effective. That is the right model for a law firm. It is also, not coincidentally, the reason why the most enduring firms in the legal industry are not the ones that have attracted the most superstars at any given moment. They are the ones that have built cultures where good people become great ones, year after year.

 

The engine room partner and institutional citizenship

The contributions that engine room partners make to an organisation have not gone unnoticed in research. Dennis Organ’s concept of Organisational Citizenship Behaviour identified a set of discretionary activities, not explicitly recognised by the formal reward system, that in aggregate promote the effective functioning of the organisation. In a law firm these include mentoring associates without taking billing credit, keeping colleagues informed about impending deadlines, staying late not just for your own client but because the firm needs it, tolerating the inevitable inconveniences of professional life without constant complaint, and participating in firm governance even when there is no financial incentive to do so.

What Organ’s research demonstrated is that these behaviours are discretionary but not optional. A firm where partners behave as institutional citizens functions differently from one where they do not. The energy available for client work, the speed with which knowledge moves through the organisation, the willingness of associates to go the extra mile, the quality of the firm’s partner meetings, all of these are downstream consequences of whether the engine room partners treat themselves as owners of the institution or as tenants of it.

These are the partners who do the invisible work that keeps the organisation together. They train the next generation of rainmakers. They smooth over the frictions that the superstars create. They participate in committees that generate no billable hours and attend events that do not appear on any revenue report. When they leave quietly, without drama, the firm notices the loss only after the fact, in the way a building notices the slow extraction of its foundations.

The challenge for compensation design is that Organ’s behaviours are almost by definition the ones that compensation systems do not measure. You cannot put billable hours on mentoring. You cannot originate credit from running a committee. The firms that handle this best do not pretend that they can perfectly price these contributions. They make clear, explicitly, that the partnership expects them, and they design the compensation formula to acknowledge them rather than render them invisible. A formula that pays only for what it can measure will produce only what it measures. The rest will wither.

This is one of the more underappreciated arguments for including a qualitative component in the compensation system, even a modest one. A formula that assigns even a small percentage of the distribution to partner development, mentoring and institutional contribution sends a signal that is disproportionately powerful relative to the financial size of the component. It tells the engine room partner that the firm sees what they do when no one is billing for it. That recognition is worth more, in most cases, than the money itself.

 

Governance and the voice of the 80%

In most law firms, the compensation committee, the management committee and the strategy conversations are dominated by the partners who generate the most revenue. This is understandable. These are the partners whose departure poses the greatest threat to the firm’s financial stability, and their views carry weight accordingly. But it creates a structural problem: the majority of the partnership, who form the backbone of the firm and carry its culture, have systematically less influence over the direction of the institution than their numbers would suggest.

The consequence shows up in predictable ways. Investment decisions get made through the lens of what suits the top billers rather than what builds the firm’s long-term capability. Associate training gets underfunded because the partners who would benefit most from a well-developed associate cohort are not the ones with the loudest voice in the room. Partner appointment decisions favour candidates who are sponsored by powerful partners, rather than those who score best on the criteria the firm claims to care about. Strategy retreats produce outcomes that the top ten partners have already agreed on and the other ninety are being asked to ratify.

The most effective remedy is not a structural intervention. It is a managing partner with the courage and political standing to create genuine space for the 80% to be heard. This means actively seeking the views of partners who are not in the room when important decisions are made. It means ensuring that partner meetings do not simply ratify what the top earners have already decided in smaller conversations beforehand. It means being willing, occasionally, to say no to the most powerful partner in the room.

This is harder than it sounds, for reasons discussed elsewhere in this book. A managing partner’s authority is contingent: it exists only as long as the partnership grants it. The partner being overruled today may be voting on the managing partner’s re-election next year. But a partnership in which the 80% have no effective voice is a partnership that over time becomes optimised for the interests of the 10%, at the expense of the institution as a whole. The top 10% will not notice the damage until it is too late, because from their position the firm looks fine right up to the moment it does not.

 

Ending political partner appointments

New partner appointments can be a potential minefield, which has caused numerous casualties. A lawyer who is being put forward for promotion is inevitably always someone’s protégé. This introduces a personal dimension into a process that ideally would be more rational. If the protégé is rejected by the other partners, this will likely be taken as a personal insult to the proposing partner. Because of this sensitivity, the partnership could decide to approve the new partner in order not to upset the partner who made the proposal. This is how mediocrity starts seeping in.

Similar dynamics operate at the practice group level. Voting against a candidate from another practice group might lead to retributions when it is your turn to put forward a candidate. Poor decisions over time create problems that cannot easily be undone. It is a hard and painful process to remove partners who perform poorly, and it comes with an emotional and financial toll that is best avoided. The surest way to avoid regrettable partner promotions is to be more objective and strict at the gate. This means putting the business case at the centre of the process rather than the relationships behind it. A candidate who is genuinely ready for equity partnership can withstand rigorous scrutiny. One who cannot withstand it should not be promoted.

A word of warning on the concept of helper partners. These are partners who serve their senior sponsor by doing much of the execution on mandates, freeing up the senior partner to focus on client relations and new business development. There is nothing wrong with the concept itself. The only question is whether the helper partner should be an equity partner. I would argue against it, as it will invariably dilute the average quality of the partner group. Making them a salaried partner or a counsel achieves the same operational effect without the negative consequences.

 

The complicated position of young partners

Even after a junior lawyer is formally admitted to the partnership with the vote behind them, the announcement made and the title on the card, something curious persists. The shift in legal and financial status is real, but the shift in how they are treated is not always as immediate. The master-apprentice relationship does not simply switch off at the moment of promotion. The young partner often carries the same psychological position in the room that they occupied as an associate: deferential, cautious about contradicting, wary of being too visible.

I described in Chapter 12 how this dynamic operates between baby boomers and the generation they trained. The same dynamic operates one generation later. Senior partners who built the firm’s current success have a deep sense of what worked and what the firm should be. They are not wrong to have that view. But a firm whose strategy is determined exclusively by what worked in the past is a firm that will be surprised by the future. The young partners who have grown up with AI as a normal tool, who trained with institutional clients that think about legal risk completely differently from a decade ago, who have never known a legal market without the constant threat of technology disruption, these partners see things that their seniors do not. Their silence is a governance problem.

The practical reason for this silence is straightforward. The young partner who challenges a senior’s assumption in a partner meeting risks several things simultaneously: being seen as naïve, being marked as difficult, and potentially closing off access to the client relationships and mandates that are disproportionately controlled by the very partners being challenged. The rational calculation, repeated across many meetings and many young partners, produces a partnership where the newest equity holders are functionally excluded from strategic influence.

A few firms have addressed this through reverse mentoring, pairing senior partners with younger ones specifically to be coached on emerging trends. When it works – when the senior partner is genuinely curious rather than performing receptiveness – it can be highly effective. It requires senior partners who are willing to learn something they did not already know, which is rarer than firms tend to acknowledge. The same quality, the genuine openness to being wrong, is also required for any broader cultural shift toward including young partners in real decisions.

The most resilient approach is the simplest: managing partners who make it their active business to solicit the views of young partners, before decisions are taken, on matters where their perspective is genuinely relevant. Not as theatre, but as an operating practice. The junior partner who has spent the last two years building relationships with in-house teams at technology companies knows things about how those clients think about legal risk that no senior partner focused exclusively on M&A for thirty years will independently know. Using that knowledge is not generosity. It is competitive intelligence.

The firms that navigate the generational transition most successfully are those that treat the departure of senior partners not as a crisis to be postponed, but as a structural event to be planned for and used. The succession of a significant practice is one of the most valuable opportunities a firm has to bring in a younger partner with fresh client relationships, different industry contacts, and a perspective on the legal market that the departing partner does not have. This requires the departing partner to be genuinely generous, in the way discussed in Chapter 12: putting the firm’s interest above the desire to maintain one’s grip on the practice until the last possible moment. It is not always forthcoming. But when it is, the result is a firm that grows stronger at each generational transition rather than weaker.

 

Career-long development

In Chapter 4 we go into the 7-Core Dimensions©. It is essential for lawyers to develop and grow on these dimensions over the entire span of their career. This has always been true, but it will become even more essential in the near future. Being a lawyer is less and less about knowledge of the law, which machines will know better, and more about the ability to come up with smart, creative and strategically effective solutions to clients’ problems. On factual knowledge we will soon not be able to compete with machines. AI will be able to scan infinitely more laws, regulations and precedents than any human could master. AI will know everything, anytime, all at once.

I can hardly stress enough how this will impact a profession that has long enjoyed a knowledge monopoly. Laws and regulations are often interconnected and keep changing. On top of that there are legal precedents that impact interpretation and market best practice that shifts over time. AI will make this largely accessible to anyone willing to pay the subscription fee. This is different from trying to find information on Google. Lawyers will need to adapt, as this will largely erase one of the core pillars that has propped up the profession.

To create and maintain a strong partnership, all partners will need to develop a mindset of learning and growing throughout their careers. Training and development have traditionally been seen as something only for associates, the partners being the finished product. That idea will not hold. Partners who do not actively develop and improve on a daily basis will find themselves trailing behind and becoming obsolete. Law firms are well advised to spend time, effort and real funding on actively developing the 80%.

 

Adapting the compensation system

As we have argued throughout this chapter, growing and developing the 80% is in the strategic interest of the firm. If this is so, why do compensation systems remain so short-sighted, focused exclusively on performance over the past year?

The fiscal year matters. At the end of each fiscal year profits are calculated and distributed in full. That is the reality of the partnership model and it will not change. But within that constraint, would it not be better to also reward growth and development? The easiest way to do this is to factor in revenue growth compared to the previous year, the last three years, or the last five. If growth is rewarded, the effort to improve is rewarded. More so than by taking only last year’s revenue as the measure, a multiplier calculated based on development over a prior period would give a premium to those who are building, not just those who have already built.

To translate this into numbers: if two partners each generate five million in revenue, but one has been steady at five million for five years and the other has grown from two million in three years, the latter should receive more in compensation because of the growth trajectory. The first is maintaining what they have. The second is creating new value. Compensation should reflect the difference.

Beyond revenue growth, the compensation system should acknowledge the behaviours that make a firm stronger over time rather than just in this year’s accounts. That means some recognition of mentoring, of investing time in associates’ development, of firm-building activities that do not appear on any invoice. The method for doing this does not need to be elaborate. A simple, honest conversation about what the firm values, backed by a compensation formula that reflects those values rather than contradicting them, is worth far more than an intricate scorecard that no one trusts.

The deeper point is this: the 80% of engine room partners are not a fixed cost. They are a growth asset. A firm that treats them as overhead, designs its compensation around the top 10%, and directs its development investment exclusively toward rainmakers will eventually find that the engine room stops running. Not dramatically, not all at once, but through the accumulation of small disengagements, quiet exits, and partners who give the minimum required rather than what the firm actually needs.

Kirkland & Ellis expanded its equity partnership by 25% at the same time as it grew its nonequity tier, and achieved revenue growth of 16% in 2024 alone. The lesson is not that growth always justifies expansion. It is that a firm confident in the quality of its broader partner group can afford to grow it. A firm that is uncertain about its engine room, that has neglected the 80% for years and allowed them to become comfortable rather than hungry, cannot. The investment comes first. The growth follows.

There is also a generational argument. Every law firm is simultaneously running a business today and building the business of tomorrow. The engine room partners of today are the senior partners of the next decade. A compensation system and a management culture that systematically undervalue them now will produce a senior partner group in ten years that lacks the qualities the firm needs, because the partners who had those qualities quietly left to go somewhere they were better appreciated. This is the most expensive way to manage talent, and it is also the most common.

A compensation system that makes the engine room partners feel they genuinely matter, not as a platitude but as a structural reality reflected in the formula, is a form of investment with a return that compounds over time. It is also very difficult to reverse-engineer once you have let it erode. Firms discover this too late, usually in the year when they first notice that their second-tier partners no longer do the things that second-tier partners used to do. By then the culture has already moved on, and the formula that drove it is still in place.

 

[1] Compensation packages of $100 million or above for individual professionals in artificial intelligence have been widely reported. Examples include retention agreements at OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed through regulatory filings and press reporting in 2024 and 2025 (Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg), and comparable packages at major hedge funds for systematic trading talent.

[2] Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, statutory accounts for the year ended 30 April 2025, filed at Companies House, December 2025.

[3] Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones and Beth Axelrod, ‘The War for Talent’, McKinsey Quarterly, 1998 (based on the original 1997 McKinsey study). Expanded as a book: Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones and Beth Axelrod, The War for Talent (Harvard Business Press, 2001). The term ‘war for talent’ was coined by McKinsey consultant Steven Hankin in 1997.

[4] This observation reflects the competitive landscape of approximately 2019–21, when Liverpool's Premier League and Champions League–winning squad contained five or six world-class players (Salah, Mané, Van Dijk, Alisson, Alexander-Arnold, Robertson) each valued above €60m by Transfermarkt, while Arsenal's overall squad value ranked higher in aggregate breadth. The comparison does not hold for more recent seasons, in which Arsenal have assembled their own elite core and Liverpool have substantially rebuilt their squad. (this footnote is for David)