The AFR’s mid-year Law Partnership Survey shows the top end monetising every crisis going — litigation, regulation and the AI panic — while quietly thinning the graduate ranks.
The Key Takeaways from the AFR Survey
- Australia’s law firms added a record cohort of new partners in the six months to July — the largest since at least 2020 — per the Australian Financial Review‘s first-half 2026 Law Partnership Survey.
- Gilbert + Tobin led the top eight on partner growth, just ahead of Allens; private-equity-backed Wotton Kearney was fastest overall.
- A record share of new partners were salaried, showing firms hoarding talent without widening the equity profit pool.
- Disputes are the growth engine, with restructuring, energy and AI advisory close behind.
- Graduate intakes were cut at several firms, but only MinterEllison blamed AI. The robots haven’t taken the jobs. Yet.
According to the Australian Financial Review‘s first-half 2026 Law Partnership Survey, the country’s firms added their biggest cohort of new partners since at least 2020 in the six months to July, with three-quarters of partnerships growing or holding steady.
Which Australian law firms added the most partners in 2026?
Within the top eight, Gilbert + Tobin posted the largest increase, with Allens right behind, the AFR reports, while MinterEllison and Clayton Utz saw very slight contractions.
The fastest grower overall was insurance specialist Wotton Kearney, whose private-equity backing is a useful data point for anyone still insisting external capital and law firms don’t mix. Cornwalls recorded the steepest fall.
The headline flatters slightly: the top eight added partners and lost almost as many, so the net picture is one of churn as much as expansion. Gilbert + Tobin chief executive Sam Nickless (pictured) told the AFR that deals remain in demand but are taking longer to close, with valuation gaps and regulatory scrutiny stretching timetables.
Why are law firms hiring salaried partners instead of equity partners?
Here is the quieter, more telling story. A record proportion of the new partners were salaried rather than equity.
Translated from partnership-speak: firms want to lock down and recruit talent without handing over a slice of the profit pool.
The salaried-partner title is the velvet rope — prestige and a business-card upgrade, but the equity ladder gets pulled up behind you. For readers tracking where the real money sits, our look at the Australian “super partners” earning $7 million a year is the relevant context: the tier these appointees are queuing behind is a very lucrative club.
What’s driving law firm growth — litigation, energy or AI?
All three, in roughly that order.
Disputes were the most-cited growth area in the survey — the textbook countercyclical play, where hard times generate the business-on-business friction that ends up in court. MinterEllison chief executive Virginia Briggs (pictured) pointed to “recessionary conditions” feeding litigation and restructuring. Mallesons chief executive partner Renae Lattey flagged the growing burden of red tape, from sharper ACCC enforcement to the new mandatory merger notification regime.
Energy practices are busy as clients push ahead with transition projects, and AI is now a litigation generator in its own right, with firms citing rising cyber and privacy risk.
M&A was the underwhelming guest: demand at the top end is healthy, but deals close more slowly, so fees arrive more slowly.
Mallesons goes solo, Ashurst goes global
The past six months also delivered the sector’s own merger theatre. In April, the entity once known as King & Wood Mallesons finalised its split, with the Australian partnership relaunching as Mallesons and marketing itself, with no false modesty, as the top-tier independent firm operating from Australia.
Ashurst went the opposite way, with partners approving a merger with Seattle’s Perkins Coie to form Ashurst Perkins Coie, a combination the AFR pegs at around $3.9 billion in revenue. We covered the deal when it was struck, in our piece on the Ashurst–Perkins Coie mega-merger. Two firms, two opposite strategies, both currently working — and, as the AFR notes, far too early to call a winner.
Is AI cutting law firm jobs yet?
Lawyers are watching the graduates with the canary in the coal mine for AI’s effect on headcount. Overall trainee numbers actually rose year on year according to the survey, yet several firms took the shears to their intakes, with MinterEllison cutting deepest among the majors.
MinterEllison was the only firm to publicly attribute its reduction to AI, noting the technology is absorbing routine work graduates traditionally cut their teeth on.
As Ashurst Advance’s Hilary Goodier (above) observed, clients increasingly expect AI’s efficiency gains to show up in how work is scoped and priced, which is a pressure that lands long before redundancies do.
For the deeper structural story, see our analysis of the legal AI split reshaping every firm’s tech stack and why the profitability divide is one Australian firms can no longer ignore.
Source: This article summarises reporting by Janek Drevikovsky in the Australian Financial Review*, “Top-tier law firms add record new partners to exploit uncertainty” (25 June 2026), drawing on the AFR Law Partnership Survey, first-half 2026 edition. Figures and executive comments are as reported by the AFR.*
