Back when law was primarily a profession, and only incidentally a business, if you were not invited to become a partner in your law firm after seven years or so, you were expected to hang your head in shame and slink out of the firm. The system was called “Up or Out.” You either graduated to partnership, or you left the firm.
Now that law firms operate on the basis of ‘business first, profession second,’ the Up or Out system is a thing of the past. Law firms are now often happy to offer a home to lawyers who want to continue to contribute billings, but who have no desire to become partners. At the same time, many associates just do not see the benefit of being partners, and are happy to make less money, accept less responsibility and risk, and live a more balanced life.
As a result of these changes, new categories of lawyers have been invented.
There are ‘non-equity’ partners, and ‘associate partners.’ Both are glorified employees who have been given the prestigious title of ‘partner’ and the ability to claim expenses on their tax return that they were not entitled to claim as mere employees. Sometimes these arrangements are a stepping-stone to full partnership. Sometimes they are not.
There are also “permanent associates” who firms are happy to have around if they keep their billings up, but who will never become partners.
Another change is that lawyers are more mobile than they used to be. Whether as associates or partners, they jump from firm to firm for many reasons, almost all of which come down to money. As lawyers jump in and out of partnerships at different firms, the relationships among partners are more transactional and less personal than they were in the old days when people tended to stay put and develop deep relationships with their fellow partners.
I have drawn three conclusions from observing these changes in the relationships between lawyers and the law firms for which they toil.
The first is that being a partner in a law firm is not as great a thing to be as it used to be, as evidenced both by the fact that there are so many more lawyers who do not want to be partners, and by the increased number of partners looking for a better situation.
The second is that many lawyers are smarter today than they used to be, and they can see that there is more to life than practicing law. By not becoming a partner, they free up some time to do other, more fulfilling things.
My third conclusion is that with all this jumping around for the best financial deal and lawyers having bought into the mantra that law is a business, not just a profession, what has been lost is the personal satisfaction of being part of a team that aspires to achieve something greater than maximizing profits.
Perhaps the time has come to get back to thinking that law is supposed to be primarily a noble profession, not a business without a soul.