Law firms spend considerable time measuring the front end of recruiting.
How long has the position been open? How many candidates have been interviewed? What compensation will it take to close the search? When can the new attorney start?
Those are necessary questions. But they measure the recruiting process rather than the quality of the hire.
A better question comes much later: Eighteen months after an attorney joins the firm, what has actually changed?
By then, the excitement of the hire has faded. The onboarding period is over. Both the attorney and the firm have had enough time to discover whether the match works in practice.
That is when a successful hire becomes much easier to recognize.
Day One Is a Poor Measure of Success
Hiring naturally produces a sense of completion. A difficult search ends, an offer is accepted and a vacancy disappears from the firm’s organizational chart.
But filling a position and solving a staffing need are not necessarily the same thing.
Consider an experienced lateral associate. The attorney may arrive with excellent credentials, strong references and relevant experience. Six months later, that person may be producing good work and meeting expectations.
That still tells the firm relatively little about whether the hire will succeed over the long term.
Has the attorney developed relationships with partners outside the immediate practice group? Do colleagues trust the attorney with important matters? Has the person begun building relationships with clients? Is the attorney becoming more valuable to the organization as time passes?
Those outcomes take longer to develop.
They also tend to matter more than whether someone appeared to be a strong hire during the first 90 days.
Think About the Hire You Want 18 Months From Now
One practical way to improve recruiting is to define success before beginning the search.
Instead of starting exclusively with qualifications, firms can ask what they want the person in the role to have accomplished after 18 months.
For one position, success might mean taking meaningful responsibility for a major client relationship. For another, it might mean reducing the amount of routine work being handled by a partner. A more senior hire might be expected to contribute to business development, mentor junior attorneys or help build a growing practice area.
Those are different needs, even if the job descriptions look similar.
Defining the desired outcome changes the recruiting conversation. Experience remains important, but the firm can evaluate candidates against the work it actually needs them to grow into rather than simply the work they have done before.
Integration Matters More Than Firms Sometimes Realize
A lateral attorney does not join a firm in isolation.
The person enters an existing network of relationships, habits and expectations. Learning how to work within that environment can be as important as learning the substance of the role.
This is where otherwise strong hires sometimes stall.
An attorney can be technically excellent and remain disconnected from the broader firm. Perhaps work continues flowing primarily through one partner. Maybe the attorney has few opportunities to interact with other practice groups. Client introductions happen slowly, or expectations around business development remain vague.
Nothing has necessarily gone wrong. But the hire has not developed as fully as it could have.
By the 18-month mark, firms should be able to see evidence of integration. The attorney should know whom to call for help, and colleagues should know when to call that attorney. Internal relationships should be forming without management having to manufacture every interaction.
That network is part of what turns an individual hire into organizational capacity.
Look at What Happened to Everyone Else
One of the best measures of a hire may have little to do with the new employee.
Look at the people around them.
If the firm hired an associate because partners were buried in work, did those partners actually gain capacity? If the goal was to strengthen a practice group, can that group now handle more work? If an experienced lateral was brought in to provide leadership, are junior attorneys receiving more support?
A successful hire should solve some version of the problem that caused the firm to hire in the first place.
If everyone remains just as overloaded 18 months later, the firm should understand why.
Perhaps demand grew faster than expected. Perhaps work was never delegated effectively. Perhaps the role was defined incorrectly. Or perhaps the new attorney was capable but never given the opportunity to assume the responsibilities the firm intended.
Looking beyond the individual often reveals whether the hiring strategy itself worked.
Client Relationships Are an Important Test
For experienced attorneys, client integration deserves particular attention.
Law firms are relationship businesses. A lateral who remains invisible to clients after a year and a half may be contributing excellent legal work, but the firm could still be missing an opportunity.
Client integration does not necessarily mean originating new business. It may simply mean becoming a trusted second relationship on an existing account, taking greater ownership of communications or developing enough familiarity that clients begin contacting the attorney directly.
That matters for the immediate role, but it also matters for succession.
The more client relationships reside with multiple attorneys rather than one individual rainmaker, the more durable those relationships become for the firm.
Retention Begins Much Earlier Than Resignation
Eighteen months is also a useful point to evaluate the attorney’s experience.
Is the role still the one that was described during recruiting? Has the attorney received meaningful feedback? Is there a clear understanding of what comes next? Have responsibilities expanded as the person has demonstrated greater capability?
These questions matter because retention problems rarely begin when someone submits a resignation.
They develop gradually.
An attorney may spend months wondering about advancement, workload or professional development before beginning an active job search. A firm that waits for obvious signs of dissatisfaction is often responding late.
The 18-month perspective encourages firms to evaluate the relationship while there is still plenty of time to improve it.
Recruiting Should Have a Longer Feedback Loop
Most firms know whether a candidate accepted an offer.
Fewer systematically revisit why a hire succeeded.
That information can improve the next search.
Perhaps attorneys from a certain type of practice environment integrate particularly well. Maybe candidates with specific experiences become productive faster than expected. Perhaps a qualification that seemed essential during recruiting turns out to have little relationship to performance.
The same analysis should apply when a hire does not work.
Was the candidate wrong for the role? Was the role poorly defined? Did expectations change? Was onboarding inadequate? Did the firm fail to provide the support or opportunities discussed during recruiting?
Without that feedback loop, firms risk repeating the same hiring assumptions year after year.
Measure the Outcome, Not Just the Hire
There is no universal scorecard for what an attorney should accomplish within 18 months. A first-year associate, senior lateral and new partner should be evaluated very differently.
The point is to decide what success means for the particular role and then return to that definition after enough time has passed to evaluate it fairly.
A useful 18-month review might ask:
- Is the attorney performing the work the firm hired them to do?
- Has the person developed meaningful relationships inside the firm?
- Has the hire created additional capacity for colleagues?
- Has the attorney become more integrated with clients where appropriate?
- Are responsibilities and professional opportunities expanding?
- Does the attorney have a reason to see a future with the firm?
- What has this hire taught us about the next one?
Those questions produce a much richer picture than whether the position was filled quickly.
A recruiting process ends when someone accepts an offer. The value of the hire takes much longer to determine.
Eighteen months later, the goal should be straightforward: The attorney should be more valuable to the firm, the firm should be more valuable to the attorney, and the original reason for making the hire should be closer to being solved.