The Business Case That Argues With Itself

Read enough lateral partner business cases and you start to notice they contain two propositions that cannot both be true.

The first is that the candidate has an unshakeable personal following. These are their clients. Nobody else at the current firm really speaks to them. The relationships are personal, portable and entirely independent of the platform, such that if the partner set up above a chip shop in Croydon on Monday, the work would follow by Wednesday.

The second, usually two paragraphs later, is that what most excites the candidate about joining is the opportunity to institutionalise those relationships, embed them across the firm and cross-sell colleagues, because at heart they are a deeply collegiate team player who has always believed clients are best served by the whole platform.

So: the relationships are purely personal and owe nothing to any firm. And also, the candidate is thrilled at the prospect of making them institutional.

Both cannot hold. If the clients are genuinely indifferent to the platform, institutionalising them is nearly impossible. If they can be readily institutionalised, they were probably never as personal as claimed, which rather undermines the valuation the whole business case rests on.

Nobody asks. The document is read, nodded at, and approved.

I do not think this is dishonesty, particularly. It is that the two claims answer two different questions from two different audiences. The first reassures the finance side that the numbers are real. The second reassures the partnership that the newcomer will not be a lone wolf. Each is written to satisfy its reader, and no one is asked to hold both in mind simultaneously.

Which is a fair description of how most difficult institutional questions get avoided: not by anyone lying, but by nobody being required to read the whole document at once.

This piece is written from market observation. It quotes no one and identifies no firm.

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