This week, the business press picked up a debate that has been brewing in the legal sector for some time: the HR directors of the country’s leading law firms now doubt that “making partner” is still the reflection of professional success. There is talk of a partnership track that is unappealing to young lawyers, of alternative career paths gaining ground, and of a pyramid that artificial intelligence threatens from the base.
The usual diagnoses point to a lack of commitment among the new generations, to shifting values, to new priorities. But if we examine the phenomenon by stripping away the biases, the reality is different: what is in crisis is not talent. It is the validity of the construct we use to measure success.
I write this from a particular vantage point: I have been a partner for more than two decades in my own firms —which is another way of playing the same game (though not exactly the same)— and, as a lawyer who has studied psychology, I tend to look at organizational structures through the lens of psychometrics. And the verdict on the traditional career model is clear: we are facing a severe case of contamination and deficiency of the criterion (the observable manifestation of the construct, in this case of “success”).
What is really going on behind the polished corporate messaging?
1. “Making partner” no longer measures excellence. It measures tolerance for attrition.
In psychometrics, a measurement instrument is contaminated when it measures variables unrelated to the construct it is meant to measure. We say the instrument is not valid. Historically, partnership was sold as the indicator of “legal excellence.” Today, with promotion processes that stretch well beyond the age of 40 and hypertrophied pyramidal structures, the variable that actually discriminates is not talent: it is the biopsychological capacity to tolerate “burnout” and the opportunity cost to one’s life.
And this is where survivorship bias contaminates the criterion: current partners are, by definition, the survivors of attrition; when the sector judges the model by looking at them (“I made it, anyone who wants to can”), it is measuring the resilience of the sample that survived, not the validity of the system that discarded the rest.
It is not that young lawyers “don’t aspire to more.” It is that they have carried out a risk assessment, and the return on investment does not pay off. That is not a lack of ambition: it is good psychometrics applied to one’s own career.
2. The trap of objective success versus subjective success
The literature in organizational behavior has spent decades showing something uncomfortable: objective success (the big firm on the top floor, the status, the nameplate) has a surprisingly low correlation with subjective success (self-efficacy, purpose, wellbeing). Forcing a culture in which the only valid indicator of success is the objective one produces dysfunctional organizations.
Firms that boast record billings while suffering double-digit turnover rates are not succeeding; they are externalizing the psychological cost of their business model (onto their professionals, onto their professionals’ families and, sooner or later, onto their clients).
3. “Alternative career paths” are not philanthropy. They are mathematics.
The new figures —”counsels,” “project managers,” “innovation specialists”— are presented as a gesture of flexibility toward the new generations. Let’s be honest: they are a structural necessity. The talent leaders of the large firms already admit publicly that junior hiring will fall drastically in the coming years as a result of artificial intelligence.
And with AI devouring the billable hours at the base of the pyramid, the traditional people-leverage model collapses under its own weight: the financial math no longer sustains one partner for every ten juniors churning through information. Firms are not diversifying profiles out of generosity (or at least not only for that); they are doing it because the spreadsheet no longer adds up any other way.
But don’t get me wrong: the fact that they do it out of math, and not out of conviction, does not make “alternative career paths” a bad idea —quite the opposite! They are the right path. What is perhaps open to criticism is presenting these paths as “generosity” while, behind closed doors, the only success that is celebrated and rewarded remains the same as always. A firm that creates counsels but only applauds partners has not diversified success: it has merely diversified the exits.
In conclusion
The real challenge for the legal sector in Spain is not to convince lawyers to once again desire the traditional partnership. Nor is it to create new roles (that is already happening, even if out of necessity). The challenge is for the measurement system to genuinely value them: to institutionalize firms and to accept that success is a multidimensional construct and, above all, a developmental one: it is built with diverse indicators, not inherited from the last century.
For a firm to be sustainable over the long term it must measure hard variables of organizational health: knowledge retention, real workplace climate, true operational efficiency, the mental health of its employees, sustainability, and so on.
If we keep measuring success with the thermometer of the last century, we will remain baffled that talent prefers to change the game rather than accept broken rules.
And perhaps that is the most optimistic reading of all: an entire generation is discovering that the menu had more options than they had been taught to see.