The American Lawyer and ALM Intelligence surveys reveals the proportion of new partners getting leadership training in-house has increased by 7 percent since 2015, but they remain concerned about future career path and compensation.

Support for new partners

The increase of 58.4 percent of respondents saying they have received leadership or management training from their firms is up from 55.8 percent last year. And 28.2 percent of respondents said they have received leadership or management training from an executive coach. That number remains steady from last year, but it has increased by nearly 5 percent since 2015. The focus for investing training resources is in business development. Nearly two-thirds of new partners (65.9 percent) said they have received formal business development training, up from 62.9 percent in 2017, and 57.3 percent three years ago. Formal project development training, while less popular, also appears to be on the rise, with 31.5 percent of respondents saying they have received it, compared with 27.2 percent last year. While these types of training are on the rise, only business development and leadership training have reached a majority of new partners surveyed. Just 56.5 percent of respondents said they are satisfied or very satisfied with the training and guidance offered by their firms. Based on respondents’ open-ended comments, the feeling of being adequately prepared for partnership is clearly not universal.

Compensation concerns

Firms could do a better job of educating lawyers on how their pay will change when they enter the partnership, since only 57.2 percent of new partners said they are satisfied or very satisfied with compensation. The proportion of respondents who are equity partners was 36.5 percent, up slightly from 2017, while 63.5 percent of respondents are income or nonequity partners at their firms. The number of new partners who have no clients of their own appears to have risen, with 18.4 percent of respondents saying they don’t have clients of their own, compared with 13 percent of last year’s respondents.