MARKET INSIGHT

Partner movement has stayed high through most of 2026. Activity has continued into the fourth quarter, and a larger share of laterals are arriving in groups rather than as single hires. Market reports also show firms favouring more experienced candidates overall, alongside steady growth in two-tier partnership structures. The practical effect is that firms are competing hard for senior capability at the same time clients are asking how that capability will actually be used once routine work can be handled differently.

Those client questions have become more direct. In ordinary review meetings a number of general counsel now ask what portion of a standard transaction or dispute still needs partner or senior associate time, and how the firm expects its staffing to change. Surveys of in-house teams point in the same direction: most expect external pricing to move away from pure hourly arrangements within a few years, and many say they have yet to hear a proactive conversation from their outside counsel about how AI might affect the work. Firms that can connect their technology spending to specific changes in how matters are staffed or how lawyers are trained tend to handle these discussions more easily. Firms that cannot leave both clients and their own associates unclear about where the practice is heading.

The range of responses is now clearer. Kirkland’s well-publicised $500 million commitment to building its own AI platform sits at one end of the spectrum, focused on embedding senior judgement and institutional knowledge across the firm rather than relying only on licensed tools. Other firms have taken different routes. Freshfields has rolled out Anthropic’s Claude models firm-wide and is co-developing legal workflows with them. Hogan Lovells Cadwalader has chosen both Harvey and Legora, running them alongside its own internal legal technology group on the basis that no single platform covers every need of a global practice. Legora itself has continued to expand quickly, including a recent firm-wide arrangement with Jones Day, while Harvey has maintained broad adoption among large firms. These choices are no longer announcements of intent. They are already shaping how work is organised and how clients are being answered.

The options available to individual lawyers have also widened. Government and regulatory experience continues to feed partner hires in disputes and investigations. A smaller but noticeable group of partners and senior associates have moved into roles tied more closely to the tools themselves, either inside traditional firms building internal capability or into the specialist providers. Harvey, for example, has been hiring more large-firm lawyers than its main rivals in recent tracking. The numbers remain limited, but the existence of the alternative changes the reference points for associates and counsel deciding whether to stay. Firms that can describe, in concrete terms, how training and work allocation are shifting are in a stronger position with that group. Some have started structured programmes that give selected juniors direct exposure to building or testing tools. Others are watching early experiments with hybrid or AI-native models in which

more of the leverage comes from technology and process rather than from a traditional pyramid of associates. The scale is still small, yet it alters the conversation inside conventional partnerships.

Cross-border demand is adding another layer. Work in energy, infrastructure, funds and certain disputes continues to move people between London, the major US centres and other markets. Partners who have already built practices across more than one of these locations simply have more choices. Firms that can offer genuine cross-office work and clear routes for lawyers who want to spend time in more than one place keep an advantage with that group. Firms whose international activity is largely made up of occasional referrals find it harder to hold lawyers whose clients expect coordinated advice.

Compensation still decides many individual moves, particularly where a partner has a portable book, and firms with strong recent results have shown they are willing to underwrite larger guarantees or cover breakage. Over the next few years, however, the firms that look better positioned are those that treat talent decisions as connected choices rather than a series of separate transactions. That means being clearer about which practices will be grown through external hiring and which will be developed internally, putting more deliberate effort into integrating the lawyers who arrive, and having a workable account of how work will be organised as the tools change. Higher mobility simply makes the results of those choices visible more quickly.

These are the questions partners are working through now. The conversations on The Partner Brief, starting with David Miles’s account of building and rebuilding a practice across different firms and markets, surface the same issues from the perspective of people who have had to make the decisions rather than only watch the data.