Oct 15, 2026 · 1 hr 6 min · 12 segments
Send us Fan Mail BigLaw is making more money than ever, but the traditional career path inside it is becoming much less predictable. Joe Patrice…
Joe PatriceGuest
Niraj ChhabraHost
So I, I wanna shift gears from, you know, practicing law in your career to the business of law, something that you've kinda covered, uh, pretty extensively.
Uh, we've seen record partner profits, enormous raises, and aggressive lateral markets for the first time in a long time.
What do you think is behind that? Do you think that this push to recruit, uh, lateral partners is a blip? Do you think that this is kind of the new trend? Because as you said, you know, it's a big shift, a deviation from let's do everything homegrown.
I think that the market, uh, especially at the elite levels, is getting increasingly mercenary and, you know, not better or worse, just different.
Uh, and so I think that's going to keep happening, uh, because firms trying to get the best bottom line are going to be seeking out, uh, to the extent anybody does have a control on its business, uh, a partner has control of their own business, everyone's gonna be in the market to go get that.
There, there are some, some reasons to worry about its sustainability, uh, in the medium term.
But if you think it becomes a fixture of how we practice law going forward, the value of legal work used to be the pyramid structure, uh, of smart person at the top and super smart people doing the brute force tasks at the bottom.
Well, the brute force tasks are disappearing largely 'cause they can be automated, so now the real question, the real value is coming from that smart person at the top.
Uh, and if that's the situation, then they become the hottest of all possible commodities.
It's no longer- My firm platform is good because look at these hundreds of junior associates and all of their great degrees.
It really is, as long as I got somebody who knows, who's an expert in their field at the top, I can set them up with a couple of good lawyers and some AI and maybe get, maybe get the same result for a lot cheaper.
Uh, that's oversimplifying, uh, and definitely glossing over a lot of the AI's hallucinatory failures that have been somewhat infamous.
B- but I think that is the equation that people are, that firms are gonna have to start considering, is that clients who are trying to, you know, uh, trying to make, get the best result for the best deal, they're gonna start looking at the partner who is making the ultimate decision as the most important part, and that means the firms have to think of it that way.
Are you seeing that more for everything you described at the individual partner level or p- practice groups? Because I've been seeing a lot of that.
... you know, 10, 20 a- attorneys to their competitors and stuff like that, you know?
So I, I wanna shift gears from, you know, practicing law in your career to the business of law, something that you've kinda covered, uh, pretty extensively.
Uh, we've seen record partner profits, enormous raises, and aggressive lateral markets for the first time in a long time.
What do you think is behind that? Do you think that this push to recruit, uh, lateral partners is a blip? Do you think that this is kind of the new trend? Because as you said, you know, it's a big shift, a deviation from let's do everything homegrown.
I think that the market, uh, especially at the elite levels, is getting increasingly mercenary and, you know, not better or worse, just different.
Uh, and so I think that's going to keep happening, uh, because firms trying to get the best bottom line are going to be seeking out, uh, to the extent anybody does have a control on its business, uh, a partner has control of their own business, everyone's gonna be in the market to go get that.
There, there are some, some reasons to worry about its sustainability, uh, in the medium term.
But if you think it becomes a fixture of how we practice law going forward, the value of legal work used to be the pyramid structure, uh, of smart person at the top and super smart people doing the brute force tasks at the bottom.
Well, the brute force tasks are disappearing largely 'cause they can be automated, so now the real question, the real value is coming from that smart person at the top.
Uh, and if that's the situation, then they become the hottest of all possible commodities.
It's no longer- My firm platform is good because look at these hundreds of junior associates and all of their great degrees.
It really is, as long as I got somebody who knows, who's an expert in their field at the top, I can set them up with a couple of good lawyers and some AI and maybe get, maybe get the same result for a lot cheaper.
Uh, that's oversimplifying, uh, and definitely glossing over a lot of the AI's hallucinatory failures that have been somewhat infamous.
B- but I think that is the equation that people are, that firms are gonna have to start considering, is that clients who are trying to, you know, uh, trying to make, get the best result for the best deal, they're gonna start looking at the partner who is making the ultimate decision as the most important part, and that means the firms have to think of it that way.
Are you seeing that more for everything you described at the individual partner level or p- practice groups? Because I've been seeing a lot of that.
... you know, 10, 20 a- attorneys to their competitors and stuff like that, you know?
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