Firms invest millions to recruit lateral partners. They negotiate compensation packages, plan press announcements, and organize a parade of introductions to business services. Then, somewhere around week three, they’re sitting alone drafting their own client announcement email at midnight, wondering if they made the right call.
When Elizabeth and I spoke with 40+ lateral partners who had recently changed firms, the numbers backed up that perception.
Surveys show that more than 40% of lateral partners leave their new firms within five years. With over 25,000 lawyers making lateral moves in 2024 alone, that’s a staggering number of failed investments on both sides.
The good news is that the failure points are predictable. And predictable problems have solutions.
Mistake One: Treating a Warm Welcome as a Strategy
Most firms are impressive on day one. They plan a full schedule of introductions, give the lateral a folder of materials, and offer a handshake from firm leadership. But once the initial flurry of activity ends, the lateral is left to figure out the rest.
“They wanted me here, but they didn’t really know what they wanted from me,” one partner told us. And that captures exactly where firms lose the plot. They know why they hired someone but haven’t thought through what success actually looks like for that person in this stage of their career.
Elizabeth Kennedy, Founder of NewEdge BD, notes that firms often avoid clear definitions of success because of the many unknown variables in a lateral move. However, she believes that establishing clear KPIs is crucial. “The firms that achieve the strongest results establish success markers before day one, incorporate them into the integration plan, and make them transparent to both the lateral and those responsible for supporting their success.”
Mistake Two: Introducing Everyone But Connecting No One
Nearly every lateral we spoke with mentioned being introduced to a long list of people across business services: six in conflicts, four in marketing, three in billing, etc. That many introductions in week one just becomes a blur of names.
Jennifer Gillman, President of Gillman Strategic Group, sees this play out from the recruiting side. In her years placing rainmaker partners, she’s watched firms go all in on the courtship: dinners, firm tours, detailed promises about associate support and marketing resources. “The effort is real and the intentions are good,” she says. “But then the partner shows up on day one, and there’s no plan for how those promises actually get delivered.” When no one is accountable for making the right introductions happen, the partner is left to figure it out for themselves.
Mistake Three: Writing Generic Business Plans
Most firms require laterals to submit a business plan. But very few include specific KPIs, and almost none include a budget. In many cases, the plan is written independently, before the lateral has had a single meaningful conversation with a sponsor partner.
Jodi Dalton, Assistant Director of Lateral Partner Integration at Mayer Brown, puts it simply: “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” She says that the plans that actually get executed share a few traits: they’re specific, owned, and built into the lawyer’s regular workflow rather than treated as a separate process. “While a well-crafted document is important, its real value lies in the ability to create momentum—sparking ongoing habits, meaningful conversations, and shared accountability that continue after the kickoff meeting.”
The most effective approach we encountered: one Director of Lateral Integration developed the plan before the lateral’s start date, drawing on the lateral partner questionnaire, the business case, and direct input from practice leaders and sponsors, with three- and six-month success markers the lateral could see and track from day one.
Mistake Four: Treating Lateral Groups as One Package
When lateral groups move together, firms often treat them as a collective asset, with group introductions and shared onboarding events. Often, one business plan covers the whole team.
One partner in our survey put it this way: “It felt like we were one big package. No one really took the time to understand what I personally brought to the table.”
Associates in lateral groups often receive even less individual attention—that’s a retention problem waiting to happen. Firms that retain lateral groups are the ones that complement group integration with individual plans customized to each lawyer’s specific strengths, relationships, practice goals, and business development style.
Mistake Five: Leaving Client Transitions to Chance
Client transitions don’t happen in a vacuum. Elizabeth Kennedy says, “Firms often negotiate panel arrangements, volume discounts, or other commercial terms while separately recruiting laterals with strong relationships in those same accounts. But they often wait until after the lateral arrives to start solving client transition issues. By then, everyone is reacting.” Some clients learned about the move secondhand: from LinkedIn, a colleague, or industry gossip—days before the firm officially reached out.
On the flip side, laterals consistently underestimated how complex client transitions would be, including conflicts, pricing, and file transfers. Most hadn’t been coached on what to expect. And most wrote their own client announcement emails without any messaging guidance from the firm.
In our survey, the firms that handled these transitions well shared a few common practices: they retained an ethics lawyer early to advise on what could be communicated and when, provided a messaging guide tailored to the lateral’s key clients, and assigned one professional to shepherd the transition across conflicts, intake, and pricing. Practices like these are seamless for the client and confidence-building for the lateral.
The NALP Bulletin’s Summer 2026 issue has a good companion piece by Alejandra Ramirez on that internal side of the equation: “Culture as Strategy: How Communication Keeps Your Laterals” (NALP Bulletin, July/August 2026).
Experienced Integration Professionals Make the Difference
Not everyone gets this wrong. The firms that get lateral integration right have invested in dedicated professionals to manage it, with defined authority and real systems behind them.
On the other hand, the firms that get it wrong don’t invest in dedicated staff to manage laterals. Instead, the work falls to a BD director already managing a full team, an HR professional with competing priorities, or a sponsor partner billing 2,000 hours a year. The result is integration that’s reactive instead of proactive, which can lead to lateral partners leaving before anyone realizes the benefits.
Increasingly, firms are finding a third path: fractional or outsourced integration support. They bring on a senior professional who steps in for the first 90 days, or the first six months, to serve as the Lead Integration Professional.
“This is an area where experienced integration professionals or outside advisors can add tremendous value, because they’ve seen these issues before. They know the right questions to ask, how to connect the right people, and how to anticipate and resolve potential points of friction before they become obstacles,” says Elizabeth Kennedy.
This is exactly the kind of engagement CMO2go and NewEdge BD provide. If your firm is in the middle of an integration right now, or preparing for one, we’d love to talk about what that could look like.
Schedule a discovery call with us here.