Trends and Analysis on Significant Issues Related to Law Firm Transitions, Partner Departures and Dissolutions

Odds are that most lawyers will decide to change law firms at least once during their career, and for many, likely more than once.

Now that your personal New Year’s resolutions are kaput, February is a good time to consider some resolutions for your law practice that will lead to a happier and healthier law firm. Like most resolutions, these are things that you want to do, and probably know that you should do, but may have been avoiding or just haven’t yet gotten done.

The effects of partner departures are rarely positive. But even if the right partners leave, partner departures can be bad for business. And while partner departures can present great risks for the firm—they can also present great opportunities—if you are prepared.

Partner departures and lateral moves can create winning scenarios for both the partners and the firms. But taking a disciplined approach to projecting the performance of any practice is the key to avoiding potential unpleasant surprises for both sides.

It is critically important to respond to partner departures in the right way. But like any risk management analysis, it is not enough to put protections in place to react. To manage the firm properly, you also must analyze whether the firm’s culture is aligned with the goal of retaining talented partners in the first place.

For law firm partners, most departures issues are foreseeable and manageable with planning and preparation.

Law firms are full of lawyers, so why would a firm full of lawyers need its own counsel? Lots of reasons, it turns out.

Well-managed firms try to anticipate situations that can lead to partner departures to prevent departures or to manage them. However, the starting point is to know what can trigger partner departures.

The best risk management approach for partner departures is to prevent the right partners from wanting to leave the firm in the first place. For the others, well, they should go.

Law firms have a range of options to reduce the likelihood of partner departures and to ethically and thoughtfully protect the firm when they occur.