© 2013 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate
Staff Writer for The Texas Lawbook
The journey to partnership for law firms has become more difficult and much narrower.
Top law firms promoted fewer Texas lawyers to partner for 2013 than last year, according to a statistical review of 21 firms with a significant presence in the state.
The firms have promoted 57 lawyers to partner – down from 63 a year ago, which is a 9.5 percent decline. Firmwide, the Texas-based firms witnessed an even bigger decline in partner promotions – almost 23 percent.
Three firms made promotion announcements this week. Haynes and Boone and Porter Hedges made their announcements Thursday and had little change in numbers from last year. K&L Gates announced its new partners Monday.
Legal industry insiders say long-gone are the days when associates hired directly out of law school worked night and day for eight years and then automatically made partner.
Steve Good, Gardere Wynne Sewell’s managing partner of the firm, said that promotion results can vary significantly for no particular reason from year to year, but he also admitted that it is “more difficult today” to make partner at a firm.
Dallas headhunter Mardy Sackley agrees.
“Twenty years ago you just had to be a good lawyer,” said Sackley, who is the director for the Texas region of the boutique legal search firm Lateral Link. “[Today], with few exceptions, you also need to be a rainmaker.”
Sackley said she is noticing a national trend – Texas included – of firms naming fewer equity partners but more senior associates, senior counsels and contract attorneys.
Of the 57 new Texas partners, 26 of them practice transactional law, while the other 31 are litigators.
If only the full-service firms are included in the count (Godwin Lewis, Susman Godfrey and McKool Smith are strictly litigation firms), transactional lawyers have a slight lead in promotions over litigation: 26 to 24.
Randy Block, a Dallas headhunter who owns Performance Legal Placement, said that the almost-even balance between promoted litigators and transactional lawyers is an indication of a strong legal economy in Texas in 2012 and the year to come.
“The fact that it’s 31-26 is unique to Texas because around the country transactional attorneys were laid off in the recession or could not get a high quantity of billable hours that are necessary to be made partner in eight or nine years,” Block said. “The fact that in Texas people are being made partner in very similar numbers from transaction to litigation shows the strength of the Texas legal market.”
The two Texas firms with the most drastic decline in promotions were Vinson & Elkins and Locke Lord.
V&E named four new partners this year, compared to eight a year ago.
V&E Chairman Mark Kelly explained that historically the promotion numbers “vary from year to year” and the firm expects a larger class of new partners next year.
“We believe in promoting associates to partner at the appropriate time and don’t have a strict up-and-out system,” Kelly said.
Locke Lord promoted only one partner in Texas this year, an 87.5 percent drop from last year’s eight new Texas partners.
When questioned about the drastic decline, Locke Lord Chief Marketing Officer Julie Gilbert said that each year the firm considers partner promotions based on many different factors, but the candidate’s location is not one of them.
“We are proud that since our merger in 2007, we have been able to promote many of our Texas associates to partners, and we are certain that will continue to happen,” she said.
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