A Cautionary Tale of the NQ Who Became a NPM (Not Partner Material)

It is easy to become pigeonholed as a newly qualified lawyer. Imagine the following scenario.

A student gains a graduate diploma in law, completes her legal practice course and then serves a further two years of training and is finally ready to take her first step into a firm.

In her first five years, she spends most of her time working on restructurings rather than deals because of the financial crisis, but the market then starts to change and M&A and IPOs pick up. During those years, she received multiple calls from legal recruitment consultants but ignored them. She was enjoying the firm, even though she was getting home at 11pm each night.

She appreciates that she rarely sees her friends. Most of them are lawyers in other firms but she is always too busy to make it to any of their get-togethers. But it is OK, as the word ‘partnership’ had been mentioned occasionally in appraisals, albeit in the distant future.

A few years later however, she is asked to attend a meeting with two of the partners in the corporate team – she is told there are no partnership options for her at the firm as she has failed to demonstrate any business development capability.

She thinks about some friends who had been in contact with recruitment consultants, who are now well en route to partnership at smaller firms. She decides to contact a recruitment agency but is told: “I’m afraid you’re too far along, if you’d thought about moving earlier in your career, we could’ve helped.”

She calls a few more agencies and receives the same answer. Suddenly she feels trapped. Her passion was to deal with multiple clients, so switching career paths to become an in-house lawyer is not an attractive proposition.

She interviews with a few firms but without a portable book of business they are not prepared to take the risk. Two years later, she leaves the legal profession.

Such a cautionary tale highlights the dangers of not considering your long-term prospects at the very outset of your career, as well as not using the network open to you.

It is important to attempt to gain experience in a variety of areas and to constantly evaluate whether your firm is the right place for your career ambitions. A failure to do so can easily leave you wondering what might have been.