The economics are brutal for law firms when lateral integration stalls. Passle CEO James Barclay says these four practical moves help protect your investment in lateral partners.
Key Takeaways for Successful Lateral Partner Integration
- Trust is a Tangible Deliverable, Not a Soft Skill. Proactively build internal trust in the first 180 days by creating visibility around the new partner’s capabilities and engineering client introductions and co-selling opportunities.
- Move Beyond Portability to Connectivity. Tracking a lateral partner’s book of business is insufficient. Leaders should measure network-level indicators.
- Align Incentives with Collaboration. To de-risk lateral hiring, firms must adjust incentive structures to reward shared outcomes, encouraging partners to open their key accounts to new arrivals.
Early 2026 will mark the release of new lateral hiring numbers. But if last year’s trends are an indication, firms are continuing to aggressively fill ranks and talent gaps with lateral hiring. After a two-year slowdown, lateral hiring snapped back in 2024, up nearly 14% year over year. And that’s only a year removed from the lowest lateral volumes since 2010. This whiplash reflects firms’ renewed appetite to buy experience, even as they tighten entry-level pipelines and push for faster impact from every new arrival.
But the economics are brutal when lateral integration stalls. According to a report from Decipher Investigative Intelligence, 48% of lateral partners leave within five years; 62% fail to bring the promised book; and roughly a third never fit culturally. Analysts estimate the all-in replacement cost of a failed lateral at 200% to 400% of first-year comp, with acquisition costs for each lateral measured in the multimillion-dollar range and aggregate losses across large U.S. firms reaching the billions annually. If laterals are supposed to be the shortest path to growth, those numbers are a flashing warning light.
| The Lateral Risk | The Reality |
|---|---|
| Attrition | 48% leave within five years |
| Portability | 62% fail to bring the promised book of business |
| Cultural Fit | 33% never integrate socially/culturally |
| Cost of Failure | 200%–400% of first-year compensation |
Here’s the uncomfortable truth we see across the market: Most laterals don’t fail for lack of technical skill. They fail because the firm never builds enough trust or awareness around what the new partner actually does, and colleagues won’t introduce them to clients. In other words, the bottleneck is internal knowledge and confidence, not capability.
The talent model is shifting in ways that heighten this risk. Firms are leaning more on experienced lateral hires and rebalanced partner tiers while simultaneously investing in data, knowledge and technology. That makes it doubly important to connect people, not just platforms, so lawyers can find one another at the moment of need.
Below are four practical moves we’ve seen help firms turn the corner from “hired” to “trusted and integrated” without adding bureaucracy.
1. Treat Trust Like a Deliverable in the First 180 Days
Trust is built on shared clients, shared work, shared wins. Make that explicit:
- Review the new partners’ projected portables strategically and have a needs assessment meeting to determine if there are challenges or opportunities to expand the relationship.
- Pair laterals with senior sponsors who can engineer co-selling moments: joint meetings, co-authored alerts, and targeted introductions within priority accounts. Provide strategic direction to relationship partners around introducing new partners.
- Set a cadence of “between-matters” outreach to top clients using value-adding insights (not sales pitches). The aim is to help colleagues feel confident putting the lateral in front of their relationships.
- Measure early behaviors that precede revenue: internal opens and responses to the lateral’s insights, introductions created, and cross-office touchpoints formed.
Leading firms are already formalizing parts of this playbook. At Latham & Watkins, for example, laterals are encouraged to engage across multiple offices and with major clients from day one, paired with mentors who help them internalize the firm’s way of working. That kind of structure accelerates belonging and business. At Barnes and Thornburg, the official two-year integration period for laterals includes access to “dedicated ambassador” service.
Read: “Full Scale Integration Can Be the Key to Solving Unproductive Lateral Performance” by Steve Nelson.
2. Measure Lateral Partner Success with Connection Metrics, Not Just Hours
If you can’t see the network, you can’t manage it. Track whether the lateral partner is gaining a diverse breadth of internal links across practices, sectors and geographies. Look for:
- Growth in cross-office collaboration. (e.g., whether New York and Chicago are actually connecting with the new partner).
- Expansion of introductions from a small circle to a broader set of referrers.
- Movement from consumption to contribution (i.e., from reading colleagues’ insights to co-authoring thought leadership to generating introductions).
Network-level indicators become your early-warning system. If the dots around a lateral aren’t multiplying by month three or four, intervene with targeted coaching and sponsorship. Effectively tracking these patterns gives leaders the evidence, not anecdotes, to course-correct in a timely fashion.
Related: “To Stay on Target, Everyone in Your Firm Needs a Production Number” by Brooke Lively.
3. Align Incentives to Reward Shared Outcomes
Firms say they value collaboration, but origination and credit policies often say otherwise. Without delving into any single compensation model, make sure your system does this:
- Recognizes referrals and co-selling (not just who opened the matter).
- Encourages practice-to-practice teaming in complex, multidisciplinary work.
- Doesn’t penalize partners for inviting a new colleague into “their” account.
When incentives match the message, partners are far more willing to introduce and cross-sell a talented newcomer.
Related: “Why Every Law Firm Needs a Compensation Audit” by Camille Stell.
4. Boost Client Portability and Referrals by Making Capabilities Visible Continuously
Most firms announce a lateral, update a bio, and hope the market (and partners) find them. Inside large, multi-office practices, that’s wishful thinking. Treat visibility as an ongoing process.
- Curate short, frequent insights that demonstrate the lateral’s knowledge in their particular niche. (Clients and colleagues learn faster from timely commentary than from a static resume.)
- Maintain a living, searchable inventory of experience that maps to real client needs.
Recent reporting has underscored the value of seeing how knowledge flows across the firm, making collaboration patterns and blind spots concrete rather than anecdotal. That kind of visibility turns “who should I call?” into a daily, answerable question.
The Mandate for Law Firm Leaders
Lateral volumes ebb and flow, but the integration problem persists across cycles. If you sponsor laterals, set a simple expectation:
In six months, we should be able to point to where this lawyer is connected, who is advocating for them internally, and which clients have seen their unique value between matters, not just during them.
That’s the difference between a promising hire and a durable growth engine.
The firms that win this era won’t necessarily hire more laterals. They’ll de-risk the ones they do hire by making knowledge visible, making trust a managed outcome, and making collaboration measurable. In a market where billions evaporate through failed integrations, that is not a “nice to have.” It’s the job.
Image © iStockPhoto.com.
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