Law firms, facing a formidable array of external trends and pressures, are simultaneously experiencing a series of internal shocks and shakeups. The most prominent of these is an ongoing reconsideration of the role played by each member of the firm — a process of asking, “What function do you play in this enterprise, and could that function be performed differently?”

This process, which has been underway for a couple of years now, is behind the move of back-office and middle-office jobs to outsourcing companies (both offshore and onshore) and the transfer of associates’ jobs to LPOs, free-agent project lawyers, and innovative offerings like Axiom and Lawyers On Demand. (Some of these functions are also being replaced by technology, at a rate that will steadily increase in the next few years.)

The impact of these efforts is already clear, ranging from the emergence of new “capitals of law” outside the major financial centers to the steady decline in the partner-associate ratio (leverage is now just below 1-to-1 in the AmLaw 200). There’s nothing sinister about this: it’s the natural market-driven process by which labour shifts and reconstitutes itself to its most efficient and effective use.

But I suspect that the partners driving this process forward haven’t thought about where it’s inevitably going to wind up. When you’ve finished asking, “What’s the point of an IT department?” and “What’s the point of all these associates?” there’s really only one question left: “What is the point of a partner?”

Asking that question — and every firm is either asking it now or will have to ask it shortly — raises some uncomfortable issues. We know what function the payroll clerk performs, and we know her job can be done in Wheeling or Belfast. Ditto the paralegal, whose job can be outsourced to someone working from home in a small town in California. We know what the associate is for: either to be groomed for future partnership and leadership or (far more likely) to do highly leveraged work and generate partner profit until eliminated, voluntarily or otherwise.

Positions like these, whose role in the overall  scheme of things is clear, can be understood and moved around as needed. But what about partners? What are they for? I can think of three possibilities.

• Do they bring in big business? (That is to say, enough business to sustain much more than just their own practice?) A small percentage of partners do, and they’re incredibly valuable. (A friend of mine in a big firm estimates that the best rainmakers are probably underpaid by a factor of 10.)
• If they don’t bring in big business, are they superb client relationship maintainers? (And I mean superb.) Most great “relationship” partners are rainmakers covered by the first category, but this possibility should still be raised.
• If they’re not critical to client relationships in either of the two preceding senses, are they tremendous managers? That is to say, are they highly valued and indispensable managers of the organization, its people, or its processes?

To my mind, at least, those three categories cover virtually all the justifications for inviting a lawyer into a law firm partnership. These are the key roles that make a firm profitable and successful — they constitute the essence of what “partner” status is supposed to describe. But by no means do all or most law firm partners today qualify under one of these headings. And if a “partner” doesn’t fall into one of those three categories, then what precisely is he or she doing in the partnership?

I suspect that a lot of “partners” in law firms today are in that position because the firm didn’t know what else to do with them, because the other partners liked them, and because times were good — in short, they were made partners because it pleased the firm to do so. Not a few younger lawyers in law firms have glared upwards at the people above them and groused, “How did they become partners?” And in more than a few cases, they’re right to wonder, because these lawyers aren’t partners so much as they’re superannuated associates who came along at the right time. It’s my belief that, speaking from a labour utilization perspective, these partners are not occupying the correct role, either for them or the firm. They need to be reassigned.

And they are. Earlier this year came a report about increased profits at AmLaw 100 firms achieved at least in part by thinning the ranks: 2% of partners de-equitized over the previous two years. that fully half the UK’s top 30 law firms are now either de-equitizing partners or considering doing so, a development predicted back in January by Hildebrandt and Citi Private Bank. In addition to steadily reducing the partnership ranks, firms are taking steps to ensure that future cohorts are smaller: Eversheds, for example, has gone so far as to create a brand new position (legal director) as an alternative to becoming partner.

There’s a growing belief among many firms that they invited too many people into the partnership over the past years and decades. Those firms are now starting the process of unwinding those errors. Record low realization rates being reported for some of the biggest US firms, as low as 85%, will only spur that development, because there’s nothing else left to cut and no one else left to reassign.

Nor is it likely that partner ranks will swell again in future, following some highly anticipated but nowhere-in-sight economic recovery. Partnership, as Stephen Mayson argues, is neither an appropriate nor a viable way to manage enterprises of the size and complexity of most law firms. The imminent arrival of Alternative Business Structures in the UK and the outside ownership they’ll bring with them should ensure that the partnership model will henceforth be reserved for smaller firms, as it was originally intended.

Law firms are in the process of reinventing themselves, but the easy work — cutting staff and laying off associates — is long past. Removing lawyers from the partnership is (or should be) an extremely difficult experience for all concerned, but as times continue to be tough and worse, the stronger members of the herd will not hesitate to cull the weaker. But most firms have yet to face up to the hardest part of all — re-engineering the firm’s workflow, delivery, pricing and compensation systems in order to compete in a new marketplace. That’s a bridge, I suspect, that few firms will find themselves willing or able to cross.

Jordan Furlong delivers dynamic and thought-provoking presentations to law firms and legal organizations throughout North America on how to survive and profit from the extraordinary changes underway in the legal services marketplace. He is a partner with Edge International and a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises.