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Reflections on the Changing Legal Profession Upon 40 Years in Practice

Eric Lewis
New York Law Journal
January 13, 2025

This is my fortieth year practicing law. It sounds like a long time, but it creeps up on you. The legal profession has changed in ways that are almost beyond comprehension to young lawyers. Much of it has been positive.

When I first started, we wrote our briefs and memos on yellow pads, which then went to the “word processing center” and a draft might reappear late at night or the next day. No cell phones. No remote access. Lawyers still dictated. No electronic filing; you needed to be in the taxi to get to the courthouse by midnight.

I worked for three name brand “mega-firms” over my summers, ranging in size from 135 to 150 lawyers. They felt too big and so I went to a civil litigation firm with 12 lawyers; I still practice with some of those folks and after a few reconfigurations, we are now 35 lawyers.

There were a number of well-regarded dispute boutiques then in major cities. Few remain. We had one split-up when we were about 20 lawyers in the 1990’s after a founding partner demanded a guarantee of $250,000 per year. That was viewed as an outrageous demand, both because of the size of the guarantee and the idea that one partner would ask for a guarantee when others were stuck with the risk of a down year.

Ebb and flow in revenue and profits were always a risk especially in a disputes practice where big cases could lead to big years and then go away the next. Quite a few smaller firms went out of business the year after a big contingency had come in.

What happened? The short answer is that law changed from being a profession to a business like any other. Lawyers in private practice expected to be paid well, but not like rock stars.

Most firms, large and small, would only make vertical partners. Associates would come and get trained and if they were good and worked hard, they could expect to make partner. They expected to stay because that was where they were raised as lawyers and their partners were more than business colleagues. Few left for greener pastures, although there were always those who had too many personality conflicts, client conflicts or a need for change.

Through it all, there was a sense that lawyers were different from their clients. They had a different skill set and different ethic and most wanted to at least do some good as well as doing well. If they were not paid like investment bankers, so be it. Plenty became investment bankers, but most did not.

It was to some degree inevitable that things would change. Law remains largely an iron backside business. The billable hour is often a poor metric for value added, but it remains the dominant basis for client billing. There are only so many hours in a day, so the economic imperative of hiring lots of younger lawyers and billing them at chunky rates in relation to their skill sets became obvious. Law firms got wealthy on leverage.

Clients generally wanted the advice of partners, but partners generally came in a package deal with phalanxes of associates. So firms had an incentive to keep growing to keep profits increasing.

The demand for associates grew while top law schools produced essentially the same number of graduates. Salaries went up precipitously and in turn law school tuitions did as well. Law students emerged with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and law firms were ready to pay large salaries to pay off that debt, for a while. But young lawyers needed to bill lots of hours and legal teams needed to grow.

Clients also began to spread their work out much more broadly, so firms could not rely on historic relationships. Clients came to lawyers, not firms, so each partner needed to become an individual entrepreneur.

When partners controlled books of business, they expected to be compensated mainly on business generation. “Service partners,” who did good work but did not have client control, became much more replaceable and senior associates could do much of what partners used to do at lower salaries.

Partners became highly mobile and formulas developed as to what percentage of their billings should be their compensation. The goal was to secure and monopolize client relationships and build teams that did not threaten control of the business. Intra-firm referral networks became scarce.

Partners fought each other—sometimes physically—over “attribution credit.” If firms did not stump up to the big producers, they would cross the street. Every lawyer was a free agent. Like a sports website, the legal periodicals touted lateral moves as one team had a huge triumph by securing a partner or group at the expense of the other.

As part of my practice, I advised many of those firms and groups; some of those lateral moves really did benefit the new firm; other moves occurred because groups were forced out. Every firm had to compete to show it was a player. Some combinations proved profitable; others were based on fanciful projections and took firms down. Some lawyers ended up much wealthier, but few lawyers ended up much happier as the scale and size of organizations grew.

To be sure, there is some nostalgia in this view of the legal profession of 30 or 40 years ago in comparison to the current market, but I do believe that in many ways the practice was more rewarding both for the lawyers, especially the young lawyers, and better for clients. Young lawyers now get less experience and less exposure to the high-level strategic work for which partners command a premium. Post-COVID, many young lawyers are told they never need to come into the office, so interaction and therefore training, much of which comes by observing before doing, has suffered. There is little expectation of a career path by the firm or by the associates. Junior associates may not be taken to court or depositions because many clients don’t want to pay hourly rates of $600 or $700 per hour for lawyers to observe, so younger lawyers spend more hours working to pay their salaries and fewer hours learning.

And unlike years ago when no firm would admit that personnel decisions were made based upon profitability, law firms cull the herd when cases go away or the deal flow slows down.

As in many spheres, it is all much more transactional. As a pure economic proposition, the business of law has been wildly successful in the years since I started out. But the current legal profession is not one that we would recognize as the one that drew us to go to law school in the first place.


Eric Lewis is chair of the boutique litigation firm Lewis Baach Kaufmann Middlemiss.

Reprinted with permission from the January 13, 2025 edition of The New York Law Journal © 2025 ALM Global Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited, contact 877-256-2472 or asset-and-logo-licensing@alm.com.

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