De-Risking Lateral Partner Hires with Flexible Legal Talent

By: Jay Harrington. Jay is the leader and founding Partner of Latitude’s Detroit office. A former Big Law attorney and founder of a boutique law firm, he has spent more than 25 years practicing law and advising lawyers and legal organizations on strategy, productivity, and practice growth. He is the author of The Productivity Pivot, The Essential Associate, and One of a Kind.

Lateral partner recruiting has become a higher-stakes exercise, as law firms use lateral hiring as a growth engine, and bidding wars for partners—particularly those with large books of business—have intensified, raising both the potential upside and the cost of getting it wrong.

As a recent Law.com article reports, firms are responding by conducting more diligence, and doing so earlier in the recruiting process. Detailed business plans, expanded lateral partner questionnaires, and deeper scrutiny of client relationships are now often requested after the first meeting with a prospective hire. The goal is to reduce the risk of a costly misstep.

But even the most rigorous diligence cannot answer the following question with any real certainty: how much work will actually come over and when? And that uncertainty creates a second, often underestimated risk for firms, which is how they staff and support a lateral partner’s practice before things become clear.

The Limits of Diligence

The Law.com article (subscription may be required) highlights that firms want earlier visibility into client relationships, revenue expectations, and growth plans. Lateral partner questionnaires are more detailed, business plans are requested sooner, and more emphasis is being placed on reference checks.

All of this reflects the reality that there are no guarantees in lateral hiring. Business plans are informed projections, not promises. Clients may follow slowly, partially, or not at all. In other cases, work can arrive faster and in greater volume than expected. Diligence can reduce uncertainty, but it cannot eliminate it, and risk remains an inherent part of lateral hiring.

The Risks Inherent in Staffing Decisions

Some of the most significant risks in lateral hiring relate to staffing, specifically the decisions firms make based on assumptions about future demand.

To support a new partner, firms may:

• Hire associates in advance of confirmed work
• Redeploy existing teams to prepare for anticipated matters for large clients
• Rebalance workloads across practices or offices

Lateral partners need support to succeed, and firms want to show commitment to their new hires. In fact, one of the forces that drives many partners to leave one firm for another is a belief that they are not being supported in their efforts to build a practice, including associate and other staffing support. Providing that support, however, is easier to agree on in principle than to execute in practice.

The problem is that staffing decisions are often made before there is real clarity on how much work will arrive and when. If the lateral partner’s clients transition quickly and work ramps up faster than expected, existing teams can be stretched thin, affecting morale and possibly lead to attrition. On the other hand, if work is slow to come onboard, firms can end up overstaffed, with underutilized lawyers. In both cases, the firm’s staffing decisions are out of sync with actual demand.

How Flexible Legal Talent Reduces Lateral Hiring Risk for Law Firms

One way firms can address this challenge is by using flexible legal talent to support lateral partners during periods of uncertainty.

Engaging experienced attorneys on an interim, project-based, or part-time basis supports a firm’s practice without adding permanent headcount. For law firms, flexible legal talent provides immediate access to lawyers with sophisticated practice experience who can integrate quickly and deliver high-quality work.

In practice, that often means attorneys with Big Law and Am Law backgrounds, including former senior associates, counsel, and partner-level lawyers. Many combine sophisticated law firm experience with prior in-house roles at Fortune 500 and other global companies. This depth allows them to step into active matters with minimal ramp-up time and operate at the level lateral partners and their clients expect.

For lateral partner integrations, flexible legal talent can:

• Scale support up or down as work materializes
• Provide immediate capacity when matters arrive faster than expected
• Avoid premature full-time hiring before demand is proven
• Protect existing teams from being stretched too thin

This approach gives firms time and data. Permanent hiring decisions can be made later, once there is clearer visibility into workload, revenue, and client needs.

A More Practical Way to Manage Lateral Growth

The increased diligence described in Law.com shows that firms are thinking more carefully about the risks of lateral hiring. That same discipline should extend to the operational decisions that follow.

Lateral hiring will always involve uncertainty. The question is how firms manage it. In periods of market volatility, firms that preserve flexibility in their cost structure and staffing models are often better positioned to absorb variability in demand without overcorrecting.

By pairing rigorous upfront diligence with flexible, scalable staffing support, firms can give lateral partners what they need to succeed, while avoiding the costly consequences of operating on assumptions.

Increasingly, firms of all sizes—from large global platforms to sophisticated boutiques—view flexible legal talent not as a stopgap measure, but as a practical component of their overall staffing strategy. Whether supporting a lateral partner as they build out a new practice, addressing uneven workflow during integration, or protecting profitability during ramp-up periods, flex talent has become an established part of modern law firm staffing strategy. When deployed thoughtfully, it allows firms to invest in growth while maintaining alignment between staffing costs and actual demand.