Grading a Marriage on the Wedding Reception

Joe Patrice, writing in Above the Law earlier this year, produced the best sentence anyone has written about lateral partner hiring. Firms, he noted, still measure lateral success by revenue brought in, “which is like grading a marriage on the quality of the wedding reception.”

It lands because it identifies the precise moment the measurement goes wrong. Not the wrong metric, exactly. The wrong event.

The reception is genuinely important. It is expensive, it is planned for months, a great many people are involved, and if it goes badly everyone remembers. But nobody seriously believes it predicts anything. We understand instinctively that a marriage is made in the ordinary years afterwards, in a thousand unremarkable decisions nobody photographs.

Lateral hiring has exactly the same shape and we treat it exactly the opposite way. The recruitment is the reception: the courtship, the dinners, the negotiation, the announcement, the LinkedIn post with the firm’s logo. Enormous energy, considerable expense, high visibility. And then the marriage begins, in the ordinary years, in which the partner either builds a network inside the firm or does not, either finds out how decisions actually get made or does not, either comes to belong or quietly starts taking calls again.

Almost every firm has a detailed process for the reception. Very few have anything much for the marriage.

The awkward part is that we already know this. Nobody thinks the wedding predicts the marriage. We have simply never carried that realism across to the process we spend far more money on.

Source: Joe Patrice, Above the Law, May 2026.

Metis Advisory works with law firms on lateral partner hiring and integration. If this is a conversation your firm is having, start one here.