Challenges Around Lawyer Attrition

BigHand released their 2025 Legal Talent and Resourcing report last week and it highlights some of the fundamental challenges firms are grappling with when it comes to lawyer attrition.

The report reiterates the broader commercial pressure firms are under, namely GC's being challenged internally (and in turn, challenging firms) to deliver more for less. Set against that context, the specific challenges around lawyer attrition are particularly stark.

Attrition is up to 27% (from 25%) across fee earner grades

By contrast, my reference for 'good' or 'healthy' levels of attrition in professional services is between 10-15%. I'll confess that frame of reference is borne of the pre-covid era, but it's worth noting that 25-27% (page 12) implies a full churn in headcount every four years, rather than every eight.

This is entirely manageable if your ways of working are codified in Standard Operating Procedures with clearly defined employee on- and off- boarding (think retail, call centres and similar), but legal is an industry that tends towards informal knowledge transfer via osmosis.

This is deeply impractical (and inefficient) if these elevated attrition rates are likely to stick around.

I also suspect that, as staff are leaving, work is rising up to Seniors and Partners to hold the fort, plug the gaps and hold on until the replacement starts.

To bring this back to the broader 'more for less' agenda - this is exactly what clients don't want their external counsel doing - lengthy handovers, work being double-handed and potentially worked at too senior a level.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, partners are going to have to either work hard to drive attrition down or accept 25-30% as the new normal and so spend time formalising the way work is to be delivered, in order to manage the inevitable disruption.

Option A: Tackle the Attrition

The survey (page 14) finds work/life balance (20% of respondents cite this as the main reason) and professional development (18%) as recurring themes from the prior year's survey, but in at number one - hybrid working is the main reason driving 2025 attrition (22%).

BigHand reference hybrid working in admirably professional, and neutral, terms; it is conceivable from the way the report is written that staff are leaving because deep down they want to be in the office five days a week, but their firm is only mandating 3 days.

Alternatively...

It seems an awfully odd coincidence that hybrid working is being cited as a (new) main reason to leave in a year in which firms have been pursuing stricter Return to Office (RTO) policies - particularly noting the US firms within the survey sample.

Even taking 'hybrid working' at that more neutral face value - it is somewhat ridiculous that 5 years after hybrid working was foisted upon the sector, it's the most cited reason for staff leaving. The dust really should have settled on this by now.

At the risk of over-simplifying, if firms want to retain that informal learning by osmosis, then it's likely they will need to increase office attendance - particularly for the Senior Associate and Partner populations.

Alternatively, a more flexible hybrid working policy can work well if there's investment in process and technology to create greater structure around ways of working - think Standard Operating Procedures, case management, resource management and workflow capabilities.

The case for better resource management, in particular, is well made within the BigHand report.

Whilst either RTO or greater structure can work, if you're looking at a 27% attrition rate where hybrid working is the main reason for people leaving - whatever you're doing currently - clearly isn't working...

Option B: Accept the Higher Attrition

The greater formalisation of working practices noted above is one path forward, but the survey speaks to two further complications in accepting higher attrition.

The first is that firms have only identified around a fifth of the Equity Partners and Senior Associates whose departure would significantly impact operations (page 18).

In a world of 10-15% attrition, firms may get away with this lackadaisical approach to risk management, but when 1 in 4 are likely to leave in the next 12 months this should be rising quickly up the Risk Committee's agenda.

Firms need to get better at identifying key person risks and putting in mitigation plans to address them or, as Dave Cook, BigHand's Global Director - Resource Management puts it:

“Identifying the potential impact of losing each fee earner – what accounts will it affect, what skills will we lose, how will our reputation suffer – is a massive profitability concern, given how clients are squeezing their panels and demanding more out of each firm they work with.”

The second complication is the over-reliance on, and under-performance of, hiring non-equity partner laterals.

Firms can accept poor staff retention, if they're strong in recruitment, but with half of firms citing limited positive impact or worse from non-equity laterals (page 12), it's not obvious that they are, in fact, strong in recruitment.

When you factor in the cash and time costs involved in losing and replacing a fee earner - a 50/50 chance that their replacement will have a positive impact isn't great.

So I'm not sure that accepting high attrition rates is the path of least resistance it appears - to make a success of this, the very least firms need to do is up their game around managing key person risks and recruitment/onboarding of lateral hires.

Summary

All in all, a rather sobering read.

A 25-27% attrition rate over the past couple of years is a significant step change from historic norms and it requires significant effort to either stabilise or adapt to that new normal.

From experience, both are hard work but both are better than just accepting the high attrition rate and firefighting the next leaver.

I recall once working with a practice group with a 34% attrition rate, it took 6 hard months of unrelenting focus to get that down to an annualised rate 12% - notably shifting from a reactive/lagging approach to capacity management and recruitment to a proactive/leading one, as well as directly addressing the cited reasons for leaving.

Alternatively - this not being my first rodeo - properly documenting and standardising processes is likely a 12-18 month project before you're more comfortably managing unplanned resignations.

Pick your poison.

Challenges Around Lawyer Attrition. Image Credit: BigHand