There is a whole industry built on lateral moves. Recruiters spend their lives placing candidates who want their career aspirations fulfilled elsewhere. But what are your chances of making partnership if you stay where you are?

Our research has been sparked by associate discontent. As regular readers will have noticed, we ran a series of major stories over 2005 on associate attrition and on how firms were dealing with career progression. At The Lawyer, we have never believed that pay hikes were the real story; when we speak to associates, it is never really the money that agitates them. It is about prospects. It is questions such as: can I make partner? How long is it before I get a shot at equity? At what point in my career should I move?

Until now, no one has been able to give comprehensive answers to these questions. So we have launched The Lawyer Career Report – the first-ever comparative guide on partnership prospects at the UK’s top 100 firms.

We started from the priniciple that a three-year timeframe was necessary to establish meaningful comparisons. Many firms surveyed had at least one year when there was a burst of lateral hiring, or a big clump of internal promotions, and it would be unfair to draw conclusions from a single 12-month period.

There are several key indicators. The first is the table specifying which firms laterally hired the greatest number of lawyers into partnership. This gives an idea of how much a firm has grown and will be of particular interest to partners looking to move. Equally, associates will be particularly interested in the number of internal promotions over the three-year period.

Associates should also look at another key indicator: the ratio of internal promotions to lateral hires for each firm over three years. If 70 per cent of the firm’s new partners over the past three years have been laterals, it gives you an idea of how the firm wants to grow its partnership.

We do not make any value judgements on lateral hiring. If there was no partner mobility, the legal market would be sclerotic; the worst thing for any firm is to have a bunch of captive workers. There is nothing wrong in bringing in senior external resource.

But in making partnership appointments, law firms have to have an eye on how they will affect their current associate constituencies. The Lawyer Career Report will help associates, partners, and indeed law firm management, to start making informed decisions.

The timing of this report is deliberate. In the coming months, many firms will be publishing their new batch of internal promotions. Those promotion announcements never normally attract a huge amount of attention. That is about to change.

Catrin Griffiths, editor