The Broken Covenant: A Retrospective -- 'Partners for Life'?

The covenant worked as follows: Join the firm, be a good lawyer, work hard and seven or eight years later you receive the golden handshake welcoming you into the partnership. Thereafter, your compensation would rise in lockstep with your peers, moving inexorably higher as you claimed your rightful place among the firm's senior partners. Of course, there were always the 'worker bees' and the business generators, but the covenant provided that all were to be treated (mostly) equally, borne of a collective notion of common purpose and shared reward. Over the last 30 years, however, this covenant has steadily eroded across firms of all sizes, resulting in a culture that more closely resembles baseball free agency than a 'gentlemanly' profession. This article examines the covenant and several of the factors that led to its demise.