The Ranks of Non-Equity Law Partners Have Proliferated

By Elizabeth Olson, Big Law Business

In recent years, the number of non-equity Big Law partners has grown at a dizzying rate. Some firms used the category as a convenient niche to tuck lateral hires or under performing partners, and other firms viewed such salaried positions as an added step on the tall ladder to full partnership.

Non-equity — sometimes called service partners— nearly tripled from about 15 percent of all partners in the 200 largest law firms in 1999 to about 42 percent this year — in the past two decades, according to new calculations by Altman Weil, Inc., a legal consulting ...