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Andy Wansell, chief operating officer, Boodle Hatfield

The number of partners being asked to leave their firms has increased significantly since the financial crash. Many of those partners leave angry, disappointed, and feeling they have been treated badly.

I can understand the disappointment, but why the anger?

The demands placed on partners have changed significantly in recent years. These demands are being made by managing partners and their management teams as they seek to drive firm performance. In the rarefied air of the executive suite the position looks clear. Top-line growth is becoming hard to come by and growth in distributable profit even harder. Once the support teams have been squeezed, establishment costs pored over and fee-earners sweated, the next stop is to get more from the partners.

Meanwhile, back in the trenches the partners are continuing to do what they have always had to do – balance the demands of the client work on the desk with winning new business and managing the people who are doing the work.

To this already heady cocktail we can add a significant increase in regulatory compliance, potentially working across borders and time zones and, for the ‘lucky’, the opportunity to take a leadership role in the running of the firm.

The view from the managing partner’s office is that something must be done. They are living and breathing the firm’s financial health aided by increasingly sophisticated financial models, and advised by a growing population of chief operating officers, finance professionals and business managers. This bloodless crew apply the cold logic of profitability to partnerships – a logic they bring from industries that embraced it long ago. They are aided and abetted by HR professionals, with their balanced scorecards and annual performance reviews.

“A performance that was once good enough is now the subject of a difficult conversation with the managing partner”

As the financial temperature rises, so the clamour to remove underperforming partners grows. And then the difficult conversations begin.

Let’s pause this movie for a moment. Do we know what an underperforming partner looks like? In fact, what does a performing partner look like?

In the past partners were left to themselves to sort out how to manage their mix of responsibilities, and often with more modest profit ambitions, or a more benign climate for law firms, partners could find a way through. The expectation was to be a ‘good partner’. Whether you worked in a lockstep or a merit-based reward system most partners could deliver a performance that allowed them to retain their place at the partnership table.

Managing partners could adopt the approach used by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in attempting to define pornography – “I know it when I see it”.

This approach worked when decisions involved how profit should be shared. It might lead to mutterings down the pub about the “iniquity of the whole bloody thing”, but no-one got fired. Now they are.

A contractual partnership relationship

If partners are to be defenestrated what is the alternative to relying on the managing partner to do the right thing? It is a move to a contractual partnership relationship. The snorts of derision are audible. More admin, more HR, more pointless appraisal meetings. I would ask those who take this line to accept there is a choice to be made, and choose their poison – place your trust in your leadership team to ‘know it when they see it’ or have a mechanism that provides greater objectivity but which comes at no small cost in time and effort and still needs someone to make the final call on what is good enough.

There is no right answer here, just two points on a continuum. How a firm decides to resolve this issue will say a lot about what it means to be a partner there. But what is unavoidable is the right of every partner to know what is expected of them. In many firms expectations have changed, but these changes have not been shared with the partners. This has left partners bewildered. A performance that was once good enough is now the subject of a difficult conversation with the managing partner.

It is the failure to develop a shared understanding of what it means to be a partner that is the source of much of the anger felt by partners as they leave, and for many who stay.