Remaking News of the Week: Adam Smith Esq on lateral madness

Three days ago I tweeted “Poor odds: 24% of lateral partners leave firm that hired them within 3 years, nearly half within 5. Average cost of hiring a lateral is $1.7m per year trib.al/tyd7V8E Via @AmericanLawyer”

In today’s Remaking News of the Week features a recent post by Adam Smith Esq, aka Bruce MacEwen, develops the theme of what can only be called ‘lateral madness’.

Bruce: “Let me share with you a stunning table from the report, which details the number of lateral partner moves from 2010 to 2017 in nine leading metropolitan areas in the US:

Need I go into excruciating detail?  In Atlanta and Chicago, it’s  more than half of all partners, and in every other market save New York – which is constrained by its own peculiar, rigid, and super-hierarchical pecking order – it’s darned close to half.  Give it one more year to run, shall we?”.

With magnificent understatement, the report summarizes this, “Clearly, the competition for lateral talent is at an all-time high”.

And he continues “I won’t recapitulate our views on the lateral partner recruiting arms’ race here, but doesn’t this all constitute a massive game of zero-sum revenue musical-chairs pursued at tremendous transactional cost in real $$ and senior-level  management distraction?”

I commend Bruce’s January 15, 2019 post to you.