There Is No Box for “I Don’t Know”

Somewhere in every lateral partner questionnaire is a section asking the candidate to quantify their portable following. Client by client, usually. Sometimes with a percentage likelihood attached.

There is no box for “I don’t know.”

Which is awkward, because for several of those clients it is the truthful answer. Whether a client follows depends on the panel review cycle, on who else at the old firm they have come to rely on, on whether the in-house team has any appetite for the administrative work of moving a file, on rates, and on conflicts nobody has run yet.

But the form requires a number, so a number is supplied.

Here is the difficulty, and it is the reason this is harder than it first looks. “I don’t know” can mean one of two quite different things, and they look identical on paper.

The first comes from a partner who has thought about it carefully. They can tell you which three clients will move and why, which two are finely balanced and what would tip them, and which one is institutional and will stay whatever anybody does. Their uncertainty is precise. It is the product of knowing the relationships well enough to see where the limits are.

The second comes from a partner who has never really examined their own practice, and whose uncertainty is simply an absence of thought.

A questionnaire that records only the number cannot tell these two apart. Worse, the ambiguity can resolve in the wrong direction, because the confident number reads as strength and the qualified one reads as weakness. So the partner who has done the thinking is penalised for showing their working, while the partner who has done none is rewarded for a number they had no basis for.

The fix is not a better box. It is asking a different set of questions first.

Is the strategic case a fit? Is this partner a cultural fit? Is the potential genuinely there? And if the answer to those three is yes, what is it that the firm actually wants from this person?

Answer those, and the portability number becomes one input among several rather than the verdict. It also matters less that the number is uncertain, because you now have other ways of judging how carefully this person thinks. You are no longer trying to read character from a percentage.

There is a footnote that firms ought to find uncomfortable. Kerry Lunz, who runs recruiting and integration at Lowenstein Sandler, has observed that female candidates consistently underestimate their portable business, and then consistently over-deliver once they arrive. They have the clients. They are simply more circumspect about claiming them.

Which suggests the process is not only failing to distinguish considered uncertainty from vagueness. It is systematically discounting a group of candidates who turn out to be right.

The observation about the questionnaire is drawn from market commentary and quotes no one. The Lowenstein material is from a published podcast transcript, September 2025.

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