Partner recruiting season is never closed, and there’s normally no bag limit. Nevertheless, as new sharing ratios get set to be announced over the coming months, this is the time of year that many ultimately fruitful and plenty of fruitless discussions between law firms and potential lateral partners begin. The meat of these discussions varies little, whether in Asia, the US, or Europe. Unfortunately, many of the partners who are looking at their options could be saved a lot of time for themselves and the firms that they are considering with some introspection. Particularly in this über-cautious economic environment, prospects for marginal players are slim. With this in mind, since many of our readers are partners and some of our associate readers ultimately will be partners, it seems that now is as good a time as any to discuss what makes a partner a viable lateral candidate.

Every firm asks for some of the same data points which give them information about the financial picture of a lawyer’s practice, not merely billed hours. All of the relevant, basic economic factors can be determined using three pieces of information: personal billable hours for each team member, working attorney collections for each, and billing and/or originating attorney collections for the partners. From these pieces of information, one can derive hourly rate, revenue per lawyer, and most other relevant raw data. But each situation is different and distilling the data to these simple figures is rarely enough. One example (not necessarily from Asia, but very possibly…) may illustrate the point.

The candidate team was from an international law firm. The lead partner came to us with a sizable book of business and a loyal team. He was around 50 years in age. His skill set, the size of the business, his ability to move it to several of our client firms, and his well-constructed team all looked promising because it folded well into the business plan of a couple of our client firms, at least tangentially.

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