Promotions are good. Within your institution, you're elevating your best to positions of greater responsibility, those who have proven themselves loyal and capable of maintaining company ethos, quality and prestige. For the individual, it's more money, respect, higher regard in the company and, arguably, society. In the funny world of professional services, promotions happen en masse. Accounting giant Deloitte, for instance, promoted 81 people to partner this year in the U.K. alone. In law, the biggest promoter of them all is Kirkland & Ellis, which earlier this month published a statement saying it was "pleased to announce that 200 attorneys have been promoted to partner". Plenty more will announce in the coming months. What most firms neglect to mention is that many, sometimes all, of these will be salaried partners: employees with little to no ownership in the business. No voting rights, no personal liability. Today, those promoted to 'partner' are high at many firms—consider Kirkland again, which in 2018 handed out more than 100 partner titles for the first time, and, just five years later, broke the 200 mark. But can the nonequity/salaried partner designation stand up to scrutiny in today's cost-conscious climate? Senior lawyers tell me that their clients are paying far more attention to who, precisely, is doing the work they're getting billed for. And it's wrong to think that well-healed clients, investment funds for instance, will overlook the issue. More clients are expecting their legal advisers to provide more detailed information on how they arrive at final totals. Naturally, then, whether or not a 'partner' is equity or salaried is being closely scrutinized... | 