At a recent meeting of large law firm leaders, we posed the following question: “What percentage of your lateral partner hires are successful or achieve their performance commitments within two years of being hired?” Their collective answer? Less than 20%.

To make sure that we were not artificially skewing the results with the imposed timeframe, we posed a follow-up question: “Of all the laterals you have hired, how many take more than two years to achieve their expected commitments?” The collective answer: Less than one in 20 take more than two years. So, extending the timeframe doesn’t seem to improve the success rate.