For decades, law firm partners were paid about the same and worked closely together on a stable roster of clients. Little of that remains.
By Sara Randazzo Aug. 9, 2019 10:53 am ET Four hundred of Kirkland & Ellis LLP’s top lawyers gathered in May at an oceanfront resort in Southern California to toast another banner year.
Being named a partner once meant joining a band of lawyers who jointly tended to longtime clients and took home comfortable, and roughly equal, paychecks. Job security was virtually guaranteed and partners rarely jumped ship. “If you get partners in their private moments to talk about ambitions for their children, I would be very surprised if many would articulate partnership in a large law firm,” said Elliott Portnoy, Dentons’s global chief executive.
A focus on data replaced tightknit camaraderie. Firms closely track how many billable hours each lawyer has logged, which clients are late on payment, and how many hours an assignment usually takes. No firm embodies the changes more than Kirkland, which was founded in Chicago in 1909 and made its name on trial work for the Tribune Co. and other clients. The firm declined to comment for this article.
Leaders at rival firms say Kirkland’s pay has forced them to pay their own top performers more, at risk of blowing apart their culture. Mr. Greenwald realized the firm needed to operate less like a law firm partnership and more like the investment bank he’d just left, if it wanted to survive. At the nation’s 100 largest firms, average equity-partner profits have doubled since 2004, to $1.88 million last year, according to American Lawyer. Eight firms average more than $4 million.
In 2000, 78% of partners held equity in their firms, according to American Lawyer’s ALM Intelligence. Last year, 56% did. “If the firm won’t be loyal to you,” said David Lat, a longtime lawyer and legal blogger turned recruiter, “why should you be loyal to the firm?” Janice Mac Avoy, a Fried Frank partner, said when she earned the partner title 23 years ago, the business model was “wait for the phone to ring” and do a good job for the client on the other end.
Making partner five years later was one of the best days of his life, he says. He soon realized the new title “makes all the bad things worse” about working in a law firm.
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