How Lockstep Is Being Rewritten One Rainmaker at a Time
Tom Borman, LawFuel contributing editor
For decades, BigLaw partnership compensation had the reassuring predictability of a Swiss watch. Progress through lockstep. Accumulate seniority. Collect your reward. Repeat.
That model isn’t dead. But the announcement in February 2026 that Freshfields, the world’s 13th largest firm by gross revenue, and an institution that maintained an all-equity partnership for its entire existence, was introducing a nonequity partner tier while simultaneously stretching its lockstep to reward higher earners at the top of the pay scale, made something abundantly clear.
The Pay Reset is Now
Freshfields isn’t alone. Cravath created a salaried partner tier in November 2023, and that move gave other highly-ranked firms permission to follow suit — Paul Weiss, WilmerHale, Cleary, Skadden, Debevoise, and Sullivan & Cromwell have all introduced nonequity tiers in the two years since.
What was once a seismic identity shift now looks like a competitive prerequisite.
The polite term, as always, is “compensation flexibility.” The practical reality is a structural rethink of what partnership means — and it’s moving faster than most firms care to admit.
Why Lockstep Is Cracking
Lockstep was engineered for a different legal market. We reported how the tide has been turning against lockstep pay right back in 2019.
Those werre the days when client relationships were stronger, deal flows were steadier and the decamping of top rainmakers to rival firms was an eyebrow raising event, not a Friday afternoon occurrence.
Global firms are now competing ferociously in high-value sectors — private equity, technology transactions, energy M&A — where a single partner can control nine-figure client relationships. When those partners look around, they find rival firms willing to make extraordinary offers to bring those relationships across.
Profit per equity partner (PEP) figures at elite firms have surged significantly over the past decade, according to The American Lawyer and Legal Business. That surge creates pressure not just to grow revenue, but to retain the lawyers generating the lion’s share of it.
Lockstep systems were not designed for that problem.
Hybrid Everything
Most firms aren’t blowing up lockstep but are quietly changing the partner payh deals by installing escape valves.
The structures vary, but the patterns are consistent with super-equity tiers for top performers, discretionary bonuses tied to major client relationships, accelerated progression through compensation bands, and bespoke retention packages that never appear in any firmwide announcement.
As one senior legal recruiter put it recently: “Lockstep still exists — but it stretches when enough revenue walks into the room.”
None of this is publicised, of course. Why would they? The optics of openly rewarding rainmakers over loyal institutional partners remain uncomfortable for managing partners who also need to retain the people who aren’t rainmakers.
The Lateral Spiral
The compensation shift and the lateral market are feeding each other in a cycle that shows no sign of slowing.
Partners with strong portable business are discovering leverage they haven’t had in a generation. When two or three firms are competing to secure a single relationship, compensation escalates quickly — and word travels fast in a profession where everyone knows everyone.
Recent high-profile lateral moves in private equity and energy transactions have been directly linked to aggressive pay offers. Each successful move validates the next partner’s willingness to test the market.
Higher flexibility invites more lateral offers. More lateral offers force more flexibility. Firms that move slowly get raided. Firms that move quickly get accused of destabilising their own culture.
There is no clean exit from this dynamic.
What Managing Partners Are Actually Facing
The balancing act is genuinely delicate, and dismissing it as a money problem misses the point.
Too much compensation differentiation and you corrode the collaborative culture that justified lockstep in the first place. Partners who build institutional relationships, train associates, contribute to firm governance and do the unglamorous work of keeping a complex organisation functional.
Too little flexibility and your most valuable revenue generators get a better offer on Wednesday and are gone by Friday. All of which means that managing partners are working out this issue in real time, without fanfare or discussion.
The result is a patchwork of hybrid pay arrangements that vary not only between firms, but even between practice groups in the same firm.
American Lawyer reported Kristin Stark, (pictured) from Fairfax Associates, reported that a number of firms were looking at creating more flexibility and less discrepancy between equity and nonequity labels. Law firm consultant Blane Prescott said “more and more” firms are creating fixed, salaried or even hourly pay for equity partners.
The Effect for Lawyers
For partners, the message is unambiguous in terms of how firms are managed. Portable business matters more than seniority, and it matters more now than at any point in the past decade. Partners controlling significant client relationships are negotiating from strength, including at their current firm, if they’re willing to have the conversation.
For associates, the implications are more structural and less immediately actionable, but remain significant. The traditional expectation that partnership delivers steady, predictable upward progression is eroding. The modern partnership model increasingly rewards revenue generation over institutional tenure.
That’s not necessarily wrong. But it’s a different deal than many associates signed up for and they should factor it into how they think about business development, client relationships, and career architecture from day one.
The Bigger Picture
What’s happening in BigLaw compensation is not an isolated anomaly.
As clients consolidate work among fewer elite firms and deal values continue to grow, revenue is concentrating in fewer hands within firms. The institutional logic that once justified equal treatment for unequal contributors is under pressure everywhere.
Most firms will continue describing their compensation systems as fundamentally meritocratic, collegial, and lockstep-adjacent. A few will tell their best partners something different in private.
The lawyers who understand which conversation is the real one will fare considerably better.
Really insightful read. I like how you unpack the traditional lockstep pay model in Big Law with clear examples and real-world context. The way you connect shifting client expectations and talent retention pressures to changes in compensation adds depth without losing clarity. It makes me wonder how firms will balance fairness with competitiveness. Do you think this trend will lead to more lateral moves between firms as lawyers chase better pay structures?