Leadership Series | Part I
For many lawyers, the route to influence inside a law firm is clear. Build an excellent reputation. Become indispensable to clients. Generate revenue. Develop a strong book of business. Earn the confidence of the partnership.
These are valuable achievements. They are also highly visible ones.
The difficulty begins when evidence of success as a partner becomes evidence of readiness to lead the firm.
A rainmaker may have exceptional client relationships, commercial instincts and professional credibility. But the job of a Managing Partner, Practice Group Leader or other senior firm leader requires something different: setting direction across competing interests, developing other partners, making difficult allocation decisions, managing conflict, building consensus and putting the long-term interests of the firm ahead of those of an individual practice or client portfolio.
In other words, law firms often know a great deal about how a partner has performed in the role they are leaving, but considerably less about how they will perform in the leadership role they are entering.
That distinction matters more as law firms become larger, more sophisticated businesses and leadership itself becomes more demanding.
A survey of approximately 250 law firm leaders by Patrick McKenna and BTI Consulting Group president Michael Rynowecer, published in June 2023 and drawn predominantly from Am Law 100 and 200 firms, found that 81% believed the challenges facing firm leaders had become more complex than a few years earlier, while 13% described them as almost overwhelming at times. The same research found that leadership was already a full-time commitment for 56% of respondents. Yet many leaders had entered the role with limited formal preparation: 67% reported operating without a clear job description and only 11% felt they had been prepared for everything they encountered.
The leadership role has changed. The question is whether the way firms identify leaders has changed with it.
Law firm leadership: key figures
| Indicator | Figure | Source | What it means for law firms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firm leaders who see their challenges as more complex than a few years earlier | 81% | McKenna & Rynowecer (BTI) | The leadership role now demands capabilities beyond those that built a successful practice. |
| Firm leaders operating without a clear job description | 67% | McKenna & Rynowecer (BTI) | Many firms appoint leaders before defining what the role requires. |
| “Eat what you kill” firms rewarding partners on financial and non-financial criteria | 57% | IBA research (2023) | Evaluation is broadening, but financial performance still drives partner reward. |
| Firms with a written leadership succession plan already being implemented | 20% | Withum (2022) | Most firms still address leadership succession when the vacancy arises. |
| Assessment-centre studies linking ratings to later supervisory performance | 26 studies, 5,850 participants | Hermelin, Lievens & Robertson (2007) | Structured assessment adds evidence that commercial results alone do not provide. |
The Rainmaker Paradox
Commercial success matters in a partnership for obvious reasons. Firms need partners who attract clients, create profitable work, protect key relationships and strengthen the firm’s position in the market.
Financial performance also remains deeply embedded in how firms evaluate partner contribution. Research presented by the International Bar Association in 2023 found that partner evaluation approaches were still led by financial KPIs, although firms were increasingly incorporating non-financial measures. Among firms operating an “eat what you kill” model, 57% reported rewarding partners using both financial and non-financial criteria. Among lockstep firms awarding bonuses, 62.5% used a combination of financial and non-financial KPIs, while 37.5% still based those bonuses on financial measures alone.
This evolution is important because what produces exceptional individual performance is not identical to what produces exceptional institutional leadership.
A successful rainmaker has typically demonstrated a set of valuable abilities. All of them can be relevant to leadership, but none, on its own, answers the harder leadership questions.
From rainmaker to firm leader: what changes
| What the rainmaker has demonstrated | What firm leadership also requires |
|---|---|
| Generating and retaining significant client relationships | Making decisions that benefit the firm even when they disadvantage their own practice |
| Building market credibility | Developing other partners rather than remaining the centre of every relationship |
| Influencing clients and external stakeholders | Resolving conflict between powerful peers |
| Delivering high-quality legal advice | Identifying and addressing underperformance |
| Performing under commercial pressure | Creating commitment around a strategy not every partner initially supports |
| Creating economic value for the partnership | Letting go of individual behaviours that drove commercial success, in order to create success through others |
What Actually Changes When a Partner Becomes a Firm Leader?
The distinction is particularly important in professional partnerships.
Unlike a corporate CEO operating through a conventional hierarchy, a law firm leader often leads people who are simultaneously colleagues, owners, revenue generators and powerful independent professionals.
Research by Professor Laura Empson into professional service firms describes authority in these organisations as highly contingent. Partners value autonomy and leaders must continually maintain the support of their peers. Significant decisions therefore require influence, negotiation and consensus-building in addition to formal authority. Her research characterises leadership in professional firms as a fundamentally collective process rather than something exercised simply from the top.
Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession identifies the same tension between individualism and collectivism in law firms: individual partners have their own clients, practices and strategic interests, while firm leaders are responsible for the collective interests of the partnership. Strategy has little chance of being implemented without sufficient partner buy-in.
That makes the transition from rainmaker to leader much more substantial than a change in title.
Six Characteristics That Become More Important in Firm Leadership
1. Enterprise judgment
Partners are accustomed to making sophisticated decisions for clients and matters. Firm leadership requires another layer of judgment: weighing the interests of different practices, offices, generations and partners against the long-term health of the institution.
The relevant question becomes less “What is best for my business?” and more “What is best for the firm as a whole?”
2. Influence without relying on authority
Law firm leaders frequently need to persuade colleagues who possess considerable power of their own. Formal position helps, but legitimacy, credibility and interpersonal influence determine whether other partners actually follow.
3. Strategic perspective
Leading a practice is no longer simply about maintaining its current success. Leaders need to interpret shifts in client demand, technology, talent, pricing and competition and translate them into choices about where the firm should invest, and where it should not.
Harvard Law School’s current Leadership in Law Firms programme reflects this broader remit, focusing on strategy, organisational alignment, innovation, change and team leadership rather than legal expertise itself.
4. The ability to create success through others
Rainmaking is often associated with individual relationships and personal reputation. Leadership requires multiplication.
Can the leader develop younger partners? Can they delegate meaningful responsibility? Can they share clients and opportunities? Can they create an environment in which talent grows without remaining dependent on them?
5. Courage around people and performance
Leadership means dealing with issues that collegial partnerships can sometimes avoid: underperformance, succession, compensation tensions, conflicting partner interests or behaviour that damages the firm.
The ability to preserve relationships while still confronting difficult issues is materially different from being popular or commercially successful.
6. Self-awareness and adaptability
The behaviours that produced success earlier in a lawyer’s career can become limitations at senior level. A highly controlling rainmaker may struggle to delegate. A fiercely independent partner may struggle to build collective ownership. A leader who succeeds through personal charisma may fail to institutionalise relationships or develop successors.
The strongest candidates are therefore not simply those with strengths, but those capable of understanding when those strengths need to be used differently.
The Case for Professional Leadership in Law Firms
Professionalising leadership does not mean turning a partnership into a corporation. It means recognising that leadership is a role with its own requirements, rather than simply a reward for past success.
Define what the firm needs from its leader
There is no universal profile of an ideal Managing Partner. A firm undergoing international growth may need different capabilities from one facing succession, cultural change or technological transformation.
Before considering candidates, firms should therefore define the leadership challenges ahead and the capabilities required to address them.
Look beyond commercial performance
Billings, client relationships and market reputation remain important evidence of partner success. But they reveal much less about how someone will manage conflict between partners, develop talent, make difficult strategic choices or put the interests of the firm ahead of their own practice.
Structured Executive Assessment can add another layer of evidence by examining behaviours such as judgment, influence, communication and problem solving. A meta-analysis by Hermelin, Lievens and Robertson, covering 26 assessment-centre studies and 5,850 participants, found a meaningful relationship between assessment ratings and subsequent supervisory job performance.
Assessment cannot predict leadership with certainty. Its value is in helping firms evaluate capabilities that commercial performance alone cannot reveal.
Beatriz Baker Araujo, Senior Advisor, Legal, Zavala Civitas
Build leadership before the vacancy
Leadership development should also begin well before a Managing Partner or Practice Leader announces their departure.
Withum’s 2022 Law Firm Leadership Survey of US law firm leaders found that while 53% of firms were developing a leadership succession plan, only 20% had a written plan already being implemented. Many firms were instead beginning to create leadership experience earlier: 75% were giving younger partners opportunities to serve in key leadership roles, and 45% were offering deputy or vice-chair positions to build skills before succession.
The objective should not be to select an heir years in advance, but to build a credible pipeline of potential leaders, understand their development needs and give them opportunities to demonstrate leadership before the decision becomes urgent.
From Successful Partner to Successful Institution
A rainmaker can absolutely become an exceptional firm leader. Commercial credibility and strong client relationships can be major leadership assets.
But they should be treated as part of the leadership case, not the leadership case itself.
The real question is not whether rainmakers can lead. It is whether commercial success alone gives a partnership enough evidence to know who will.
As law firms become more complex businesses, leadership selection needs greater discipline: define the role, identify the capabilities that matter, assess them and develop future leaders early.
Leadership should not simply reward the role someone performed exceptionally well. It should prepare the firm for the role it needs them to perform next.
About the author Beatriz Baker Araujo
Senior Advisor | Zavala Civitas
Beatriz Baker Araujo is a lawyer with more than thirty-five years of experience in the international legal sector and a former partner at Baker McKenzie. She currently advises firms and organisations on legal strategy, leadership and talent management as Senior Advisor at Zavala Civitas and as an independent non-executive director.
Sources and Methodology
This article draws on published surveys of law firm leaders (McKenna and Rynowecer, 2023; Withum, 2022), research on partner evaluation presented by the International Bar Association (2023), academic work on professional service firm leadership (Empson; Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession) and a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of assessment-centre validity (Hermelin, Lievens and Robertson, 2007). Survey data mainly reflects US firms and is used as indicative for European markets. The six leadership characteristics are Zavala Civitas’s interpretation of this evidence.
- McKenna, P. and Rynowecer, M. (2023). Examining the Inner Workings of Law Firm Leadership. LLRX.
- McLaren, M. (2023). Defining the Perfect Partner. Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession (IBA research).
- Withum. (2022). 2022 Law Firm Leadership Survey.
- Empson, L. (2017). Leading Professionals: Power, Politics, and Prima Donnas. Oxford University Press.
- Couture, R. (2023). Leading the Way. Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession.
- Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession. Leadership in Law Firms programme.
- Hermelin, E., Lievens, F. and Robertson, I. T. (2007). The Validity of Assessment Centres for the Prediction of Supervisory Performance Ratings: A Meta-Analysis. International Journal of Selection and Assessment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are rainmakers often chosen as law firm leaders?
Commercial success is the most visible evidence of partner performance, and financial KPIs still lead most partner evaluation systems, according to research presented by the International Bar Association in 2023. That makes rainmakers the natural candidates for leadership, even though the role requires different capabilities.
What is the difference between a successful partner and a successful Managing Partner?
A successful partner creates value through their own clients and practice. A successful Managing Partner creates value through others: setting direction, developing partners, resolving conflict between peers and putting the firm’s long-term interests ahead of any individual practice.
How prepared are law firm leaders when they take on the role?
Often not well prepared. In a 2023 survey of around 250 law firm leaders by Patrick McKenna and BTI Consulting Group, 67% reported having no clear job description and only 11% felt prepared for everything they encountered.
Can executive assessment predict law firm leadership performance?
Not with certainty, but it adds evidence that billings and client relationships cannot provide. A meta-analysis of 26 assessment-centre studies with 5,850 participants found a meaningful relationship between assessment ratings and later supervisory performance.
When should a law firm start leadership succession planning?
Well before a vacancy arises. Withum’s 2022 survey found that only 20% of firms had a written succession plan being implemented. Firms that build a pipeline early, through deputy roles and leadership opportunities for younger partners, can assess candidates on demonstrated leadership rather than commercial performance alone.
