Where Are Top Firms Bringing On The Most New Partners?

By Aebra Coe | 2025-11-12 16:35:14 -0500

Lateral partner hiring data for the last five years paints a surprisingly static portrait of where top law firms are making the most hires, even as they warm up to secondary and tertiary legal markets.

Despite the data, legal recruiters paint a picture in which top firms are increasingly agnostic when it comes to the location of a partner, as long as they bring a solid book of business in a practice area that aligns with the firm's strategy and commands top rates.

"What's happened over the past five-plus years is that the borders on where we work really doesn't matter anymore. Clients want the best talent no matter where it is," said David Maurer, an executive director at legal search firm Major Lindsey & Africa.

You can see that increased openness in numerous recent office openings in cities where white-shoe law firms may once have never deigned to consider.

Looking at lateral partner hiring data from Firm Prospects, however, the saying "the more things change, the more they stay the same," comes to mind.

In terms of lateral hiring numbers for the 50 largest law firms, the top two cities over the last five years were New York and Washington, D.C., with no exception and by a large margin. Los Angeles and Chicago were predictably also on the list of top five geographies for lateral partner hiring each of the last five years. San Francisco dropped off the top five list in 2024 and Boston made its first appearance in 2025. The 2025 numbers are year-to-date as of the end of October.

When looking at how lateral partner hiring by the top 50 has changed outside the top five cities, there's more movement. Certain cities — think Austin, Texas, Miami and Salt Lake City — saw a spike in activity as firms opened new offices, but the flurry of activity often slows back down within a year or two and the level of hiring often returns pretty close to what it was before the city became a hot location for office openings.

That means the actual ratios, in terms of hiring location, aren't changing much.

Firms may be increasingly agnostic about location, but New York and D.C. — especially New York — are still the legal centers of the universe.

In fact, hiring is happening there at a similar ratio to the other cities as it was five or so years ago, despite what has seemed like a significant uptick in office openings elsewhere.

"You can see when a new area gets hot and then flattens out," Firm Prospects CEO Adam Oliver said.For example, in Salt Lake City there were zero lateral partner hires by top 50 law firms in 2020. Then there was a major uptick as a number of top firms opened offices there, with 18 lateral hires in 2021 and 30 in 2022. The list of firms that opened up shop in Salt Lake City in 2021 and 2022 includes Mayer Brown LLP, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati PC, Foley & Lardner LLP and Kirkland & Ellis LLP.That uptick, however, was followed by a steep decline in the years since, with just three lateral partner hires made by top 50 firms in 2023, seven in 2024 and six so far this year, according to the Firm Prospects data.

"It's not as disruptive as you might expect over a long period of time," Oliver said of the entry of large law firms to new locations.

With regard to D.C. coming in second as a top lateral market, the federal government is a substantial driver of business and hiring for law firms, and in 2025 that was especially true as a historic number of lawyers left the government as President Donald Trump began his second term.

And one of the reasons for the relative stickiness of large law firm hiring patterns in New York is simply that there are substantially more lawyers — and more high-rate business and clients — there compared to the rest of the U.S.

Law firms that aspire to be dominant in areas like capital markets, finance and private equity know that the clients they want to secure are most often in New York, Kent Zimmermann, a strategic adviser to law firms at the Zeughauser Group, said.

"There's also a lot of competition there too, so it's a double-edged sword," Zimmermann said.

That competition increasingly includes "very profitable" law firms with Wall Street roots that once were less active in the lateral market, such as Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and Paul Weiss, Rifkind Wharton & Garrison LLP, according to Natasha Innocenti, a recruiter at Empire Search Partners.

"Those firms, and those like them, are pulling away from the pack in an ever-increasing way" in terms of profitability, which allows them to "pluck the very best talent," Innocenti said. Plus, the high profitability levels allow for larger compensation offers for top partners, she said.Still, the increasingly sprawling nature of large law firms is worth paying attention to. In today's legal market, New York, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago only tell a part of a law firm's strategic story.

The bursts of business activity as midsize cities grow and attract new companies, or the companies founded there grow exponentially larger, remains important to law firms' individual strategies.

"You can now have a premium practice in a tertiary market — a national practice, not just representing the local business community," said Michelle Fivel, a recruiter at Hatch Henderson Fivel.

--Editing by Alanna Weissman and Michael Watanabe..The Bottom Line is a column by Aebra Coe. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Portfolio Media Inc. or any of its respective affiliates.