Chapter 2 How Do You Ensure You Make Partner?

• Library: Accelerating Lawyer Success: How to Make Partner, Stay Healthy, and Flourish in a Law Firm (ABA) (2015 Ed.)

Lawyers who make partner . . .

• Are masters of their fate

• Engage in strategic career investment
• Feel in control

• Are highly networked

• Use others' expertise
• Develop informal mentoring relationships

• Plan, plan, plan (and "calibrate" by seeking constructive feedback)

Making Partner

There were many things Greg hoped to get out of his career when he graduated from law school in 2002. He's the type of guy who likes to stay busy, give back to his profession and community, and be recognized at work. He started his career at a major law-firm with these goals firmly in mind. In addition to doing the amount of work he felt was necessary to move up the ranks, he made sure he was doing good work; he strove for both quality and quantity. And his efforts didn't just stop there. He purposely took on projects in slightly different fields from his current specialty to expand his knowledge base, and he jumped on every opportunity to write or speak on panels. Thanks to his efforts to produce, learn, and give back, Greg felt as though his work was aiding in helping the economy and his community in the process. Eight years later, Greg had made partner and felt as though he had a meaningful career.

Matt also took a long-term focus in developing his career, although he concentrated on different short-term goals along the way. At the beginning of his career, improving his skills in his specialty area and developing business were his key aims. To master skills and business development, he concentrated on learning the things he needed to perfect his trade and on making connections both inside and outside of the office. Like Greg, Matt was promoted to partner. For Matt, success required honing his skills in one specialty area and setting himself up for future business development opportunities. For Greg, success meant diversifying his practice by expanding his general knowledge base and giving back to the profession. Despite the differences in their paths and focus, both made partner at their firms.

Like Greg and Matt, lawyers often judge success in different ways—winning cases, closing deals, or simply finding enjoyment in the day-to-day work tasks, to name just a few. The first accomplishment many people think of when they imagine success in a law-firm is making partner. New associates at law-firms know that not all of them will achieve that goal. In reality, only a small percentage will attain partnership status. For example, many of us have heard of some version of this process, such as the Cravath System or the "Tournament of Lawyers." Under the traditional Cravath System, there was the concept of "up or out."² If the firm did not see potential for an associate to move up, there was no reason to keep that associate around. Like the Cravath System, the "Tournament of Lawyers" approach, detailed by Marc Galanter and Thomas Palay, holds that a major incentive for associates to work hard at a firm is a desire to win a "game" in order to make partner.³ More recently, law-firms have instituted alternative models of promotion. In some firms, today, it's not so much "up or out" as it is "up to what level?" Some firms have a non-partner track that they let associates move into, and some promote promising talent to counsel rather than partner.

Given the prevailing model of promotion in law-firms, where only a select few make partner, it's not surprising that many young associates find themselves asking the question, "How can I become one of those few?" This question may seem like it must have a complicated answer, but as Dr. Seuss once posited, "Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple." And while "simple" may be an overstatement, it is true that the answer is not as complicated as one might think. Making partner involves hard work, strategic relationship building, planning, a little—or a lot—of help from mentors along the way, and a take-charge-of-your-fate mind-set.

In this chapter, we unravel the key characteristics, mind-set, and skills our research found in law-firm lawyers who make partner on time or even fast, and give suggestions on how associates can develop some of those characteristics. Later chapters will delve into the characteristics, mind-set, and skills associated with other kinds of success, as well as our findings on different lawyer subgroups, such as the differences between men and women in the quest to partnership, how mentors can help the process, and how the recipe for success may look different 30 years down the road in your career.

Who Are the Partners?

We found that lawyers who make partner within 10 years tend to have certain characteristics in common. For starters, they are highly networked within their firms. They are not just connected personally to their colleagues; they also know how to use others' expertise. In other words, partners don't just know people. They know who knows what, and are able to strategically leverage that information to get their work done effectively and efficiently. Beyond having a strong sense of where expertise lies in the firm, partners tend to develop more effective informal mentoring relationships than those who do not make partner.

Similarly, they are masters of their fate; they tend to strategically plan both their day-to-day work and their careers. As a group, they tend to make and stick to plans more than lawyers who did not make partner. Unsurprisingly, partners also feel more in control of their lives. They have a mind-set that enables them to be proactive, plan, and take charge of their lives. They tend to develop strong, strategic relationships with others and manage their work environment. As Greg and Matt did, they invest in their career both for the short and long term, which means investing in their own work and the people around them.

Billables

When most lawyers think of what it takes to make partner, they immediately think of the all-powerful billable hour. Tales of the importance of billing time—and lots of it—can begin even before you enter law school. After all, if there's one thing we all know about lawyers in big firms, it is that they're working nonstop. Every moment of a lawyer's career is spent finding ways to bill as many minutes as humanly possible during a day (all in six-minute increments, of course!), right? And everyone has heard about the increasingly high billable hour targets that young lawyers are expected to maintain. With all of the attention given to the billable hour, it is easy to believe that the key to partnership is billing, billing, and more billing. Do enough work, and do it well (or so the common wisdom goes), and you will reach that vaunted status. However, our data does not support such a simple conclusion; as Greg told us, billable hours are necessary but just not sufficient for promotion.

Men who did and did not make partner billed roughly the same number of hours. Billable hours and partnership were related for women, but our data suggest that a number of...