Ask a firm how a new partner is supposed to build a network internally and you will usually get a version of the same answer. We introduced them to everyone. We told them our door is always open. They know where we are.
All of which is true, and none of which works, for three reasons that have nothing to do with the partner’s ability.
The first is that they do not feel entitled to your time yet. A partner of twenty years’ standing who has just changed firms is, socially, a new joiner. They are acutely aware of being expensive, of being watched, and of not yet having earned anything here. Asking a busy colleague for forty minutes to explain what they do feels, to them, like an imposition they have not yet paid for. So they do not ask. Nobody with an open door ever discovers this, because the absence of a request looks identical to the absence of a need.
The second is that the pay-off is invisible from where they are standing. Internal networking is a bet on a return you cannot see in advance. The partner does not yet know that the tax team’s expertise is exactly what one of their clients will need in March, because they do not yet know what the tax team does. Against a billing target and a client base in transition, an unquantifiable conversation loses to a quantifiable task every time. And it loses again the following week.
The third is the one firms almost never account for. Even a partner who is confident and motivated can only seek out the colleagues they have heard of. The whole point of a new firm is that most of it is unknown to them. They cannot ask for an introduction to the person whose practice would transform one of their client relationships, because they have no idea that person exists. The organisation chart is not the map. It shows the departments but not the specialisms, and certainly not who is genuinely good at what.
And this is where the problem stops being about laterals at all. Partners of twenty years’ standing frequently cannot say, with any precision, what a good number of their colleagues do. At the complex, high value end of the market it is worse, because the work itself keeps moving. A practice you understood three years ago has since reshaped itself around something you have never heard of. Knowing the firm is not a thing anyone does once.
So the firm asks the person with the least information to solve, alone and in months, a problem it has never solved for itself.
Put those three together and self-service networking fails for the confident and the diffident alike, and it fails worst precisely where the value is highest, in the parts of the firm the new arrival has never heard of.
Which makes “our door is always open” an abdication dressed as hospitality. It puts the burden of initiation on the person with the least information, the least standing and the least time.
The alternative is not complicated, and one or two firms do it well. Someone who knows the whole firm decides who this partner should meet and why, puts the meetings in both diaries, and tells each side what the conversation is for. The partner is not asking for anything. They are attending something. That single change removes all three obstacles at once, and it costs a few hours of somebody’s attention.
Metis Advisory works with law firms on lateral partner hiring and integration. If this is a conversation your firm is having, start one here.