Who wants to lead? Untested assumptions and polite, well-meaning lies can lead to succession planning mistakes. Tracy Callahan identifies four partner patterns that corrode even the strongest partnerships. Can you spot them in your firm?
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Is Your Law Firm’s Future Built on Truth or Assumption?
“Sarah,” a managing partner, had been dancing around the subject of her retirement for more than six months. She finally asked her four partners directly: “Do you want to step up and fill my shoes?”
All four said yes. Of course.
When I spoke with each of them privately, all four said no: They didn’t want to step up. They liked being tier-two. They had never aspired to lead. Once Sarah actually committed to a retirement date, they’d start planning their own exit strategies. One has already decided to make a run at becoming a district court judge.
The Danger of Untested Assumptions Among Partners
Sarah had been building her firm’s future on yeses that were never tested and thus were assumed. One truth-seeking discussion changed everything .
Sarah had asked the wrong question. “Do you want my job?” is a question about individuals. The question the firm needed her to ask was different:
“What does this firm need from each of you when I’m gone — and is that something you want to give it?”
The Law Firm Is an Entity, So Treat It Like One
Most law firm partners believe they are in a partnership. However, many are in something closer to a cost-sharing arrangement: attorneys working in parallel, each tending to her own practice, sharing overhead and a receptionist and, occasionally, a client.
The difference is whether the partners treat the firm as an entity with its own identity, its own needs and its own future — something separate and apart from the sum of their individual practices, something worth tending deliberately.
When partners operate from that perspective, the internal calculus shifts. The question is not limited to “What’s in this for me?” The question expands to “What does the firm need from me right now?” That distinction sounds simple, but its implications are enormous. And both questions can be answered at the same time.
Every person who touches a firm benefits from viewing themselves as a steward — not just the managing partner. Shared stewardship is a decision and a culture.
Research on psychological safety by Amy C. Edmondson, Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, shows that when you change the nature and quality of a team’s conversations, outcomes improve — not incrementally, but exponentially. Cultivating a culture of candor strengthens both the firm and the relationships that sustain it.
Four Partner Patterns Hiding in Plain Sight
After 30 years of working inside and around law firms, I started naming the partner patterns I kept seeing — patterns that stifle real growth and lead to succession planning mistakes. I call them the 4 U’s.
Can you spot any in your firm?
1. Unexamined Assumptions
One partner wants to scale, hire associates and build a regional brand. Another wants low overhead, high margin and a predictable practice. Neither is wrong — but when those differences stay unspoken, they pull the firm in competing directions. Sarah’s succession plan was built entirely on assumptions she had never tested. When she finally asked the real question, the answers restructured everything.
Do you and your partners have the same answer to: What does success look like for our firm in five years? If you hesitated, you just found one.
2. Uninitiated Conversations and Partner Resentment
Every partnership has them — the topics that get discussed in the parking lot and never make it into the meeting. Silent scorekeeping lives here. So does the origination tension nobody names, the compensation arrangement that stopped feeling fair two years ago, and the partner whose workload has dwindled. You cannot build on top of resentment that everyone is pretending doesn’t exist.
What topic has appeared on three consecutive management committee agendas and still hasn’t been discussed? That’s yours.
3. Untracked Contributions
Nonbillable work keeps a firm alive — mentoring, recruiting, committee leadership, firm administration, client development. When it is invisible on every report that matters, it breeds the exact resentment that fractures partnerships. If the work is done to further the firm’s success, it belongs in a report.
What contributions to the firm aren’t being captured? Start tracking.
4. Unclear Authority
When no one has defined who gets to decide what, every choice becomes a calculation or a conflict. Can a partner approve a paralegal’s vacation without consulting anyone? What about a $5,000 marketing spend? In the absence of clear decision thresholds, partners are perceived as bottlenecks or going rogue — and either way, tension builds. Clear authority is not about power. It is about protocol, and protocol protects relationships.
What decision came up last month that nobody was quite sure who should make? Use it as a reason to build out your decision-making protocol.
- What requires unanimous agreement?
- What requires a majority?
- What is every partner not permitted — nay, expected — to decide on her own?
The One Habit Worth Starting This Week: Soliciting Partner Candor
At the close of your next partner meeting, say this:
“Give me one or two topics you want to make sure we cover next month.”
Make this a standing invitation so it signals that every partner’s concerns are expected here. Candor strengthens the firm and the relationships that sustain it.
The conversation that could have calcified into resentment gets onto the agenda instead. The leader who asks absorbs the social risk on behalf of the room. Cost: 90 seconds. Return: a culture that doesn’t hide the truth.
And once a year — ideally before anyone feels the urgency — ask each partner directly:
“Do you still want this? What does the firm need from you right now, and what do you need from it?”
Not a performance review. A genuine human-to-human check-in on alignment.
Worst case? It’s a great excuse to go to lunch one-on-one. Best case: You reveal a structural mismatch or a succession conversation five years before it becomes a cliff event.
Sarah needed this habit. She almost built her future and that of the firm on four polite and well-meaning lies.
Not Everything Is a Big Thing
After three decades in these rooms, I can confidently say most partnership problems are not emergencies waiting to happen. They are accumulations. Small misalignments that compound because no one paused long enough to name them.
Which means most of them do not require a restructure, a retreat or a difficult confrontation. They require a jostle. A well-placed question. A conversation that has been postponed for no particular reason. A moment of candor between two people who actually like each other and simply don’t have the habit of saying what is true.
Firms that address these partner patterns describe something that sounds almost too simple: fewer taboo subjects. Less walking on eggshells. The conversation that used to require three pre-meetings and a week of dread happens over lunch instead.
Because they built a culture where difficult things have somewhere to go.
One difficulty to be alert to is that when you are inside a firm, you carry its filters. You know the history, who is sensitive about what. You know which topics have been tried before and landed badly. That knowledge is valuable — but it can also be the thing that keeps the jostle from happening.
Still, try it. Ask the question. Be willing to rock the boat a little. If the filter is too thick to see through on your own, bring in someone without it to ask the questions that surface the unspoken. Not a transformation, just a jostle. Sometimes that is all a firm needs to get everyone reengaged and moving forward together.
More Law Firm Management Tips From Attorney at Work
How to Create a Law Firm Annual Plan that Doesn’t Die in a Drawer
The Top 10 Challenges for Managing Partners
4 Ways Effective Practice Group Leaders Build Strong Peer Relationships
Nobody Told You It Would Be This Lonely: A Roadmap for Women Managing Partners
Succession Planning Without Panic: 5 Tips to Open the Conversation
Lateral Partners Don’t Fail for Lack of Talent, They Fail for Lack of Trust
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