“They’ve done a perfect job of it,” a London partner says of his former firm, Kirkland & Ellis, describing the firm’s 1,000-strong salaried partner tier as a “market changing hydra”. It’s transformed not only how Kirkland does business, but the hiring market itself.
“You have Kirkland non-share partners on the recruiter’s speed dial, because they’re hot sh*t. It doesn’t matter that they aren’t equity,” the partner says. “The recruiting firm gets to tell all their people, and clients, that we’ve collared a Kirkland partner, a real one. And they love it. It changes how the firm is seen in the market, the whole vibe. It makes firms feel like they’re players.”
Perhaps this is why criticism of Kirkland’s non-share—or salaried, or nonequity—tier has hushed in recent times. Because any firm operating within Kirkland’s sphere of influence could benefit.
I wrote recently about how complicated the ‘partner’ title had become, about how, whereas once being called a partner meant you were an owner of a business, today it could mean anything from ownership, partial ownership or no ownership at all. And despite calls for firms to be more upfront about who within their partner ranks is nonequity, including from yours truly, today, the nonequity tier is entirely normalised.
Having for years evaded the question, Debevoise & Plimpton this month confirmed to Law.com that it was adding a nonequity tier.
It follows other recent movers like Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton and Cravath, Swaine & Moore. Now, sources say Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Ropes & Gray and Freshfields are considering the same thing.
I’ll pretend that a Debevoise partner didn’t, just a couple of years earlier, tell me it’s just not something the firm would consider doing. But all is forgiven.
Today, when a firm adopts the model, it’s accepted as modernization, and quite removed from the old accusations of ‘gaming the system’ or deploying ‘fake partners’.
Among the Am Law 100, it’s now the dominant partnership structure...
