The incessant war for legal talent shows no signs of abating. As law firms continue their battle to attract fresh talent, retain their star rainmakers, and keep hold of their best junior lawyers, the latest hiring fashion in the lateral market is large group moves between firms. Read through the lateral move highlights of 2024. This phenomenon was very much on trend – not so much among the big names on Wall Street or Wacker Drive, but right across fast-growing legal centers, from Boston, Dallas, and Houston to Atlanta, Denver, and Miami.
The same phenomenon applies in terms of the size of law firms choosing the group move option: they were not necessarily the biggest players. In fact, law firms across the spectrum, ranging from Am Law 50 to Am Law 200 in size, followed the trend by hiring large lateral groups.
Among the attorneys who took part in group moves last year, there were several instances where more than a dozen attorneys switched firms. For example, 14 lawyers moved firms to open a new Denver office, 17 attorneys joined an Am Law 10 firm in Los Angeles, while 18 lawyers, including six partners, moved firms to open an office in Atlanta. In taking a major step to enter the US legal market at scale, one UK law firm managed to recruit a 30-strong group of lawyers from two firms to launch simultaneously in New York and Los Angeles in January 2025.
From our perspective, the rest of this year promises more of the same. Any law firm that positions itself as a new kid on the block when entering a fresh local market needs to think carefully: the logic of hiring a team rather than incrementally adding individuals can be compelling.
The first key drivers for managing partners with a plan are speed and efficiency. As more and more firms rapidly expand by opening new offices across the US, a greater number of legal hubs are forming than ever before. Where possible, the most cost-effective and practical approach to kickstarting these offices is to buy an entire function or team from another firm which already has a foothold and, ideally, a solid local market reputation as well.
Lateral partner hiring certainly remains strong across multiple practice areas. As annual GDP growth in the US looks set to continue, pushing up to and beyond the 3 percent mark, this will continue to fuel demand for legal services. In meeting that demand, it can be relatively easy for a partner in demand by an expansionist law firm to bring a team of associates with them as a package deal, rather than the firm in question hiring lateral associates one by one over time.
The latter option is naturally slower, invariably much more time-consuming, and frequently much more expensive. To an extent, it can also be much riskier since there is no sense of team or unified culture in a group of randomly hired individuals who come from diverse law firms with notably disparate cultures. A sizable group hire also makes a much bigger local impact by creating an instant presence.
In terms of lateral hiring activity levels in the first few weeks of 2025, we had Am Law 20 law firm clients telling us that: “It’s starting to feel like 2021 again.’ That year delivered the busiest lateral hiring market on record across large law firms.
Typically, such a spike is driven by a surge in transactional activity across the M&A and private equity markets as deal activity proliferates. Market sentiment certainly seems to be on the up, as the trend towards lower interest rates looks set to materialize at some point, notwithstanding the short-term focus on tariffs and talk of trade wars. When the Fed ultimately decides to start cutting further, borrowing will become more accessible. Meanwhile, business valuations and expectations of price-earnings multiples seem to be returning to more realistic levels.
Although the economy of Trump 2.0 still has to take full effect, the backdrop and mood music have certainly helped to boost the market for legal recruitment. Ever since the election results last November, lateral hiring activity in corporate and transactional practice groups has increased dramatically compared to the early summer of 2024, when the outcome of the election was much less certain. Much of this, of course, is purely market-related, rather than being a by-product of politics: as the stock markets began to build up steam in mid-2024, so did the volume of lateral hiring.
Having undertaken a record amount of lateral associate hiring during 2021 and 2022, which was particularly prevalent among elite Am Law 20 firms in major legal hubs, the wider legal industry in the US is now starting to feel the way it did before the pandemic.