Roughly half of lateral partner hires do not work. Either the partner is gone inside five years, or still there and not delivering the business they were hired to bring. Each one costs a firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation, lag time, search fees and leadership attention.
They do not fail in eighteen different ways at random. Our founder set out the recurring ones in Win the Talent Game after two decades of watching firms make them. Most firms recognize four or five as their own. The work is knowing which, before the search starts rather than after the partner leaves.
Mark the ones you recognize as you read. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the count stays in your browser.
Before the search starts
Five of the eighteen happen before anyone contacts a candidate. They are the cheapest to fix and the most expensive to skip.
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Our founder calls this the biggest strategic mistake he has seen firms make. Holding still is not on the menu. Partners retire, move or die, the ones who remain get older, and ten years on the lawyers over 65 control most of the revenue with no obvious successors, headcount is down a fifth, and the market has quietly filed you as an old firm. Now you are recruiting from weakness.
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Adding headcount is not a reason. Know whether you are buying a market, a practice, deeper service to the clients you already have, or reputation in an industry. The answer dictates everything that follows it, including which candidates are worth a conversation.
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The first question we put to a firm is why a lateral should move to it. A larger footprint, more practice areas, a deeper bench, rate autonomy, reputation, compensation. If leadership cannot answer that in a sentence, a good partner will not invent one on your behalf.
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Do the assessment honestly, strengths and weaknesses both. The selling points have to be genuine. A firm cannot sell a robust intellectual property practice on the strength of two lawyers, and a partner who has done diligence on you will know.
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Here is the contradiction we see constantly. A firm wants a lateral with a full, self-sustaining book, and it also wants that person to absorb the overflow work. There are only so many hours in a day. The answer is usually a good lawyer whose plate is about half full and who is hungry to bring in more.
How the search is run
Six are purely operational. None of them require a better candidate pool, a bigger budget, or a stronger brand. They require a decision and a calendar.
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Respond inside 72 hours. Anything longer than a week is problematic, because a good lateral reads it as a firm that is not that interested. They know their value in the market. Time kills deals.
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One person in charge, with a comprehensive checklist, from the first conversation to the signed offer. Truly organized firms are the exception rather than the rule, and the disorganized ones lose candidates to firms that are not obviously better.
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Three meetings. Four at the outside. A small leadership meeting first, a wider one second, an optional social third. Every additional meeting raises the chance the current firm finds out, and the risk is carried entirely by the candidate.
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The managing partner is often the first contact a top lateral has with a firm, and sometimes the only one that matters. Give one accountable person the process end to end, and ideally that person is not a lawyer. We have watched a firm whose internal recruiting staff blocked access to the decision makers lose a substantial amount of talent and revenue.
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If a firm is not comfortable recruiting on its own, or does not have the expertise or the bandwidth, our founder’s advice in the book is plain: retain a reputable search firm. Half-committed recruiting is worse than none, because it burns the candidates you will want later.
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Sometimes the right move is to wait. A conflict has to clear, a personal matter has to settle, a bonus date is three months out. Forcing a timeline that does not work is how a firm loses a candidate it had already won.
Who gets chosen
Five are judgment. This is where a firm talks itself into the wrong person, or out of the right one.
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Incompatible practice areas, rate discrepancies, mismatched expectations on hours and origination, conflicts, staffing, overhead, personalities, and firmly held beliefs about how compensation ought to work. Any one of them can undo a hire the spreadsheet approved.
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Most good firms set a minimum book, as in do not bring us anyone under $800,000. Our founder presented a candidate with a $250,000 book against a $750,000 minimum, who had a verifiable relationship worth more than a million dollars. The firm refused on the number. The lateral went elsewhere, and that one client became almost $2 million a year for the firm that took her.
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In more than twenty years our founder has yet to meet an attorney who wanted one. If the model requires the candidate to earn less, the model is the thing to revisit, not the candidate.
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Significantly overpaying with lengthy guarantees helped put a number of firms out of business, some of them among the largest and most prestigious in the world at the time. They took on debt to fund the guarantees and infuriated existing partners whose own compensation was lower and not guaranteed. A year, or two on rare occasions, is defensible. Three, four or five is a major mistake.
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Both sides have to do it, and no amount of it guarantees success. What it does is tell you which risks you are actually taking. The line between diligence that is thorough and diligence that breaches a duty is narrow and worth knowing precisely.
What has to be protected
Two are non-negotiable. Get either wrong and the other sixteen stop mattering.
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Recruiting is selling. The lateral candidate experience runs from how the receptionist answers the phone to how the compensation conversation is handled. Lateral attorneys are not looking for a job. They have a job, and it is usually a very good one. Firms that genuinely recruit themselves are extremely rare, and arrogance is a weakness your competitors will gladly exploit.
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If there is a cardinal rule in lateral hiring, this is it. The candidacy is held in strict confidence at all times, without exception. Ninety-nine percent of the time a prospect is exploring without their current firm’s knowledge, and it takes exactly one person to end the process and damage someone’s standing at the firm they still work for.
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Four or five is normal. The firms that fix them are not smarter, they are just the ones that named them out loud before starting a search.
Keep reading
Number eighteen is the one with the sharpest edges. What you may and may not ask during lateral diligence sets out where the line actually falls, and why crossing it is worse than doing no diligence at all.
