July 26, 2002

Hard work, long hours a must to garner top job in local law firms

To become a partner in a law firm, you have to do your time in the trenches. Most require their associate attorneys to build a practice, groom a client base and develop a reputation for five to 10 years before they are eligible for a top position at the firm.

?You have to be billing over and above normal hours to catch the attention of the partners,? said Veronica Paricio, counselor and coordinator of career services at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s School of Law. ?Those that are working really hard all the time (become partners).?

That means bringing new clients and business to the firm, billing hundreds of hours a month and spending extra time at the office without complaint. The payoff of being named partner is more money, more prestige, a chance to own a piece of the firm, and, in rare cases, getting your name added to the door.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Business Cares: March 2024

WomenGive, a program of United Way of Larimer County, was started in Larimer County in 2006 as an opportunity for women in our community to come together to help other women.

For the most part, there are two types of partners. Equity, or general, partners buy a percentage ownership in the firm and share in the profits the firm generates. Non-equity, or special, partners have neither ownership stake nor entitlement to profits, instead drawing a conventional salary as compensation. The real value of partner status comes from name recognition and the success in leveraging that reputation to attract fresh or lucrative clients.

?In a lot of firms, business is brought in by partners and the work floats down to the associates,? said Julie Carroll, director of attorney recruitment at Holland & Hart, a Denver-based law firm with an office in Boulder.

Not that partners are simply sitting around at their mahogany desks surfing the Internet for good Caribbean cruise packages while their underlings toil away. Partners are involved with running the day-to-day business operations of the firm, like generating business, meeting payroll and paying the bills.

Additionally, partners play the role of teacher and trainer to the associate attorneys in the firm. They not only assign casework, but also help them amass the proper credentials and experience for a potential partnership role down the road.

?I would call it a mentoring process,? said Dan Cleveland, a partner with Lathrop & Gage of Kansas City, which has seven partners and seven associates in Boulder. ?As an associate, you have a partner assigning you work. Then they see if you work well with all the partners, the administrative staff and the other attorneys.?

Cleveland said it is about a seven-and-a-half year process to go from associate to partner at Lathrop & Gage. Similarly, at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, a San Francisco-based law firm with five partners and 13 associates in Broomfield, associates should be willing to put in seven to eight years before anticipating being tapped as a partner, said Rich Plumridge, a local partner with the firm.

But just putting in time at a law firm doesn’t guarantee the promotion. At Hogan & Hartson, associates go through an ?elaborate analysis,? according to Bill Roberts, a managing partner with the Washington, D.C.-based law firm’s Boulder office. The partnership counts up an associate’s billable hours and determines how many new clients were brought in.

Generally, it takes an attorney seven years to get to the point where the partners decide whether he or she should make partner at Hogan & Hartson, Roberts said, with serious evaluation starting a couple of years prior. ?It’s a bureaucratic process,? he said. ?After five years, (the partners) judge whether you’re on track to be partner or not.?

For lawyers looking to fast-track the journey to partner status, small local law firms might be the answer. Whereas enormous, national or international firms often set their partnership track at 10 years or more, local firms demand less. At Berg Hill Greenleaf & Ruscitti, a Boulder-based law firm with a total of four partners and six associates, five to six years to partner is more typical ? but it could be less, if need be.

?An associate starts to generate their own client base and gets a reputation with certain clients,? said George Berg, the firm’s managing partner. ?Clients refer them, and they start to build their own practice. When it looks like they can go off on their own, the partners will see if they want to retain him.?

The disadvantage of not hanging on to a productive associate is losing a good attorney to the competition, which includes other law firms, clients who take on lawyers as in-house legal counsel or the world of private practice. Retention strategies might include throwing bonuses at the star associate, increasing the annual salary or voting them to be a partner ahead of schedule.

?If a person would leave, and we’d like to keep them, that would be a factor we’d look at,? Lathrop’s Cleveland said.

Partners split the profits the firm generates once payroll, overhead and other costs have been covered. According to the partners interviewed for this story, becoming partner almost always results in a healthy pay increase. For example, law firms in New York represent the top of the legal food chain. A partner at the 10 highest-paying firms in the Big Apple earned an average annual salary ranging from $1.2 million to $3.3 million, according to ?The American Lawyer? magazine.

While salaries in Colorado are far more modest than New York’s, law partners can make a pretty comfortable living here. According to the most recent economic survey done by the Colorado Bar Association, partners at Colorado law firms reported mean salaries ranging from $136,000 to $231,000 in 1999, depending on the size of the firm. Contact John Aguilar at (303) 440-4950 or e-mail jaguilar@bcbr.com.

To become a partner in a law firm, you have to do your time in the trenches. Most require their associate attorneys to build a practice, groom a client base and develop a reputation for five to 10 years before they are eligible for a top position at the firm.

?You have to be billing over and above normal hours to catch the attention of the partners,? said Veronica Paricio, counselor and coordinator of career services at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s School of Law. ?Those that are working really hard all the time (become partners).?

That means bringing new clients…

Christopher Wood
Christopher Wood is editor and publisher of BizWest, a regional business journal covering Boulder, Broomfield, Larimer and Weld counties. Wood co-founded the Northern Colorado Business Report in 1995 and served as publisher of the Boulder County Business Report until the two publications were merged to form BizWest in 2014. From 1990 to 1995, Wood served as reporter and managing editor of the Denver Business Journal. He is a Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder. He has won numerous awards from the Colorado Press Association, Society of Professional Journalists and the Alliance of Area Business Publishers.
Categories:
Sign up for BizWest Daily Alerts