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Roughly one in twenty associates who start at a top US firm will make equity partner there.

That is the number nobody puts in the recruiting brochure. The brochure says the partnership track is “approximately eight to ten years.” That is technically true and practically misleading — because it describes the timeline of people who finish, not the probability of finishing.

The honest answer is that the BigLaw partnership track is a twelve-year funnel with five stages, four exit ramps, and a survival rate that would not pass muster as a clinical trial outcome.

Here is what each stage actually looks like.

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