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By Murray Gottheil | August 28, 2025
In this Part, I would invite you to live in an imaginary world where you respect and appreciate all of your partners, each of them is a phenomenally talented lawyer who is also productive, respectful, collaborative, ethical, and has an amazing client base. And they all love you too.
If you are a typical law firm partnership, you will not be content to let things be. No, the firm must grow and increase its profits and the prestige of each of its partners. You need more partners! And to be fair, you don’t want to lose your bright young associates who are chasing the Holy Grail, and you cannot keep all of them satisfied with non-equity partnership gimmicks indefinitely. So, grow you must.
Deciding who to admit as new partners is of the utmost importance, because even a single mistake can be like introducing a virus or a cancer into a human body.
And so you would think that law firm partnerships would be extremely careful about who they admit. And typically, they are careful about certain criteria such as the capacity of the new partner to generate billable hours and to introduce clients to the firm. When it comes to other criteria that are arguably even more important, such as professional abilities, ethical standards, anger management issues, willingness to mentor and train, misogyny, internal competitiveness, being collaborative, and all those other “soft” skills and attributes, well, exceptions can be made.
For those of you who think I exaggerate, I do not. We have all seen highly profitable partners who are scummy human beings. And yet, law firms tolerate them.
So, not only is it important for lawyers who are contemplating joining a partnership to evaluate the character of the existing partners, they also must understand the decision-making process by which new partners will be admitted, and the pressures that may be brought to bear upon them to go along with partnership admissions with which they may have concern.
During my career, I found myself pressured to admit partners against my best judgment, and in 100% of those cases, I lived to regret it.
At my friend Martin’s firm, a senior partner launched a campaign in support of his technically excellent, but ethically challenged, associate. Once the associate was in as a partner, he turned on his sponsor, who ultimately left the firm and apologized to Martin for having pressured him to admit the associate.
The bottom line is this: Lawyers seeking to join firms as partners must not only understand what they are getting into, but must understand and develop a comfort level with the process by which the firm makes changes.
And always remember that getting in is easier than getting out.
Murray is a happily retired lawyer who lives in the country, drives a pick-up truck, writes, teaches and mentors. You can reach him at murray@murraygottheil.com or see what he is up to at lawanddisorderinc.com.
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