Attorney lateral movement is reshaping the legal industry at a pace that is difficult to overstate. Am Law 200 firms hired more than 12,000 attorneys at all levels during 2024 alone, including approximately 2,728 partner-to-partner moves – roughly 52 per week – according to Decipher. Lateral hiring drives revenue strategies, restructures practice groups, realigns client relationships and in some cases determines whether a firm grows or stalls.

Yet for all the resources law firms pour into recruiting laterals, almost no one has stopped to measure what is working and what is not – and the absence of that data is exactly what prompted us to build the Lateral Lift Lateral Attorney Survey.

Lateral Lift is a joint project of Poston Communications and LawVision, two organizations that have spent decades working alongside law firm leaders on the marketing, business development and communications strategies that drive firm growth. We have watched the lateral market evolve from a secondary talent strategy into the primary growth engine for firms of nearly every size. We have also watched integration programs fall short, client relationships erode after a key partner departure, and marketing and business development professionals struggle to gain a meaningful seat at the lateral recruiting table.

Our companion white paper, “Beyond the Offer Letter: A Dual Playbook for Law Firms and Lateral Hires,” to be published in the coming days, documents that the industry generates substantial lateral activity but consistently underinvests in the integration that follows. Talented people accept offers and then find themselves without a structured plan for the critical first 180 days. Whether a lateral becomes a solid addition or a firmwide asset almost always comes down to internal visibility, organized collaboration and accountability on both sides.

The absence of reliable national data on how law firms and their clients experience this dynamic is a substantive problem for the industry. Firms make decisions worth millions of dollars based on instinct, anecdotes and informal benchmarking. In-house counsel decide where to send their work based on factors that law firms are largely guessing at.

What the Survey Asks

The survey, which is now open, follows three distinct tracks based on the respondent’s role.

Law firm executives – including CMOs, CBDOs, COOs, CHROs and managing partners – are asked about the role lateral hiring plays in their firm’s revenue growth, how marketing and business development is involved across the recruiting lifecycle, what integration programs look like in practice, how performance is measured after the hire and where the biggest deficiencies are. The questions go beyond surface-level inquiry. We ask whether firms conduct gap analyses of lateral candidates’ books of business, how much time a CMBDO dedicates to lateral growth strategy, and how many lateral hires are still with the firm after one year – including what distinguishes the ones who stayed.

In-house and general counsel follow a separate track with questions designed to surface their direct experience with lateral movement from the client side. How disruptive is it when a relationship partner leaves? Have lateral moves caused them to shift work to a different firm? How satisfied are they with their law firms’ management of attorney transitions? What information do they need when a departure occurs, and are they receiving it?

Recent lateral hires will answer questions about their experiences with their new firms during the recruiting and integration periods.

Taken together, the three tracks will produce something that does not currently exist in the legal industry: a matched view of the lateral experience from all sides of the client relationship. The white paper establishes what good integration looks like across the first 180 days, and the survey will show how law firms measure against that standard and where the largest gaps in integration practice are.

Why JD Supra

Reaching the respondent pool this research requires demands precision in distribution. The three-track survey needs meaningful participation from executives at law firms across the Am Law 200 and beyond general counsel and other in-house legal leaders at companies across industries and recent laterals. These audiences engage with content that reaches them through channels they already use for professional development and peer-level intelligence. Response quality depends on reaching people through outlets they already trust for substantive professional content.

JD Supra is one of the few outlets in the legal and legal business space that has built verified, sustained readership across all populations. With more than one million readers, it distributes legal analysis and business content to law firm professionals and in-house counsel daily, organized by practice area, industry and role. That audience architecture made it a logical fit for a project that depends on parallel input from three  distinct groups who do not typically sit in the same room.

Choosing JD Supra was a research design decision. The quality of the survey results is a function of response rate and respondent relevance. An outlet with broad passive reach would have produced volume without precision. JD Supra’s segmented distribution model routes content to readers based on demonstrated interest in specific topics, which supports the kind of targeted outreach this study requires.

Co-founder Adrian Lürssen and his team have distributed the survey across JD Supra’s channels, amplify the white paper findings on release and participate as co-presenters when we bring the findings to the legal marketing and management community. Their involvement in the publication and presentation phases reflects how Poston, LawVision and JD Supra built this partnership from the start: three organizations jointly accountable for the research’s quality and reach.

How the Findings Will Be Used

The survey data will be analyzed and synthesized into a comprehensive industry research report and white paper. The report will present national benchmarks across firm size, role and geography and will identify the patterns and opportunities the data reveals. We expect the findings to challenge widely held assumptions about lateral integration, the role of marketing and business development in the recruiting process and what in-house counsel experience when the attorneys they rely on change firms.

Following the release, Poston, LawVision and JD Supra will host a joint webinar to present and discuss the results with the broader legal community.

The goal is to give law firm leaders, legal marketing and business development professionals, and in-house counsel a common body of evidence to draw from as they make decisions about lateral strategy, onboarding investment and client communication.

How to Participate

The survey is open to law firm executives,  in-house counsel and recent lateral hires who want to contribute to the first national data set on lateral attorney hiring and integration. All responses are confidential and will be reported in aggregate; no individual or firm will be identified in the published research. The survey takes approximately eight minutes to complete and will remain open through November 1.

Beth Huffman is a managing director at Poston Communications, a leading public relations agency serving professional services firms. Silvia Coulter is principal and chair of the Business Development Practice at LawVision. Together, they lead Lateral Lift, a joint research and advisory initiative focused on lateral attorney integration and hiring.