Lateral hiring has become a core growth strategy for law firms, but early results from the Lateral Lift Survey suggest most firms are flying without full instrumentation.

The research, a joint effort from Poston Communications, LawVision and JDSupra, finds that while more than two-thirds of law firm executives say their firm tracks lateral hire performance (revenue, client retention, origination and utilization), a meaningful share say tracking is only partial, and a small percentage remain unsure whether it happens at all. On the front end, the picture is similarly uneven: just over half of firms conduct any kind of GAP analysis on a lateral candidate’s book of business, whether through an existing framework or a lateral-specific process, leaving nearly as many firms making high-stakes hiring decisions without one.

Process maturity varies widely too. Only about one in six firms report having a fully owned, formal lateral recruitment checklist, while a substantial share still handle the process without a consistent framework at all. And when executives were asked to name their top challenges in lateral recruiting and integration, time and resource constraints topped the list by a wide margin, followed closely by integration issues after hiring and limited collaboration between leadership, recruiting, and marketing teams.

These are the operational gaps that separate firms who successfully lift lateral revenue from those who lose it to poor onboarding, weak diligence or disconnected teams.

If you lead business development, marketing, recruiting or firm operations, your input will help define the benchmarks other firms use to evaluate their own lateral strategy. The survey takes about eight minutes, all responses are confidential and reported in aggregate, and it closes soon.

Help us complete the picture of what separates strong lateral integration from a missed opportunity. Take the Lateral Lift Survey now.

Beth Huffman, a managing director at Poston Communications, has more than 40 years of experience in communications, media and marketing. She has spent the last two decades helping major law firms, legal organizations and their global clients create strategic narratives that elevate their reputations and work.

Adrian Lürssen is co-founder and VP of strategic development at JD Supra. Connect with him on LinkedIn here.