Over the years, the way profits are distributed among partners has changed. This shift has given rise to a hidden risk: the erosion of the partner who props up the firm’s structure without being counted among its star performers

Compensation systems for partners in law firms have been quietly transforming for years. The lockstep system has often been so heavily managed that it is no longer a lockstep. The “eat-what-you-kill” system has been so softened that it is no longer pure individualism. Both are converging toward the same point—profit sharing—driven by the dispersion of profitability among partners, lateral mobility, and, now, artificial intelligence. But that convergence comes at a cost that no one calculates: the erosion of the partner who acts as a “good citizen” or, in Professor DeLong’s words, the “B-player”—the partner who doesn’t appear in the rankings but who sustains the structure. Moving too quickly toward profit sharing without protecting that “B-player” is to trade a problem of retaining stars for a problem of the organization’s silent collapse.

There are transformations taking place in law firms without anyone formally declaring them. There is no press release, no name change for the model, no speech by the managing partner announcing a new era. Simply, one day the firm has a compensation system different from the one it had five years earlier, even though it continues to call it by the same name.

Miguel Ángel Pérez de la Manga Falcón, partner at BlackSwan.
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