You Made Partner—Now What? How to Succeed in Your New Role

Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast, where I sit down with successful attorneys, legal marketing specialists, business leaders, and authors to talk about how lawyers and law firms can grow and sustain healthy, profitable businesses.

Hello there, and welcome back to another episode of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast, where we bring you insights and strategies to help lawyers thrive in today's competitive marketplace. I'm Elise Holtzman, your host. Today, I'm flying solo to talk about a topic that is super exciting and also a little bit daunting. That is what to do after you've made partner at your law firm.

Becoming a partner is obviously a huge milestone in your legal career. It represents all those years of hard work, dedication, and success. It's also a turning point, though, because partnership comes with a whole new set of responsibilities and expectations. It's not just any longer about being an excellent lawyer. It's about becoming a leader, a rainmaker, and an owner of your firm, an architect of your firm's future.

In today's episode, we're going to explore exactly what that means. I'm going to share some actionable tips on how to navigate this new chapter, whether it's new for you in the last few months or new for you in the last few years, how to embrace your leadership role, develop your book of business, and set yourself up for long-term success as a partner.

Whether you're celebrating a recent promotion, preparing for what's next, or you're just curious about what partnership really entails, this episode is going to be packed with advice that you don't want to miss.

Before we get started, today's episode is brought to you by the Ignite Women's Business Development Accelerator, a nine-month business development program created by women lawyers, for women lawyers. Ignite is a carefully designed business development program that has content, coaching, and a community of like-minded women who are committed to becoming rainmakers and supporting the retention and advancement of other women in the profession.

Registration is now open for our 2025 Ignite cohorts and early bird pricing is available. If you want to learn more about Ignite, visit thelawyersedge.com/ignite and you can even reach out to talk to me about it personally. The last couple of years have been an incredible journey in terms of building Ignite into the program it is today and I look forward to having you be part of that.

Let's dive in and answer the big question: Congrats, you just made partner. Now what? First, I encourage you to take a deep breath and congratulate yourself. Again, even if this was a few years ago, let's take a minute or so and take a moment to remind yourself of what a rock star you are.

One of the things that I know about lawyers, and I'm kind of guilty of it myself, is that we're so busy executing and helping other people achieve things, that when we do something ourselves, the tendency is sometimes to go, "Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, I did that thing," and not really take the moment or more than a moment that you deserve in order to savor your success.

So pat yourself on the back, appreciate the hard work that's led you to this point. Once you've had the opportunity to do that, then it's time to start thinking about and getting busy on the topic of what to do next. The first thing I think is important to do is to take stock of where you are. That means starting with understanding the financial implications for you.

I find that some lawyers, even when they make partner, they don't have a particularly good idea of how their compensation is determined. Be very clear about what you're earning, how you get paid, what financial contributions you need to make to the firm, if any, what your benefits now look like, what tax filings you need to make, whether there are accounts for you, whether there are some kinds of investment accounts for you, what your capital contribution might look like or what that capital account looks like.

Whatever that whole compensation package is, make sure you understand it. If that means sitting down with somebody at the firm in an administrative role or somebody at the firm, like the managing partner or the CFO, whoever you have around you, do it. Because like most things, making partner is one of those things in life where you're just supposed to figure it out yourself and it's up to you to figure it out.

It may be that somebody sits down and explains it to you. It may be that nobody sits down and explains it to you. If that's the case, it's up to you to figure it out. Obviously, if you're an income partner or non-equity partner, not much may change in terms of your compensation. But if you're now an equity partner, you need to understand all of the things I just mentioned, as well as how your compensation is decided.

Who makes those decisions? How are the liabilities determined? How are they chunked up among the partners? What does the financial stability of the firm look like? And we're going to get back to that when we talk about firm economics.

Whether you're an income partner or an equity partner, if you don't already have trusted financial advisors, such as a knowledgeable CPA, some kind of financial advisor, an investment expert in your corner, now would be a good idea to research and find people you can talk to, people who are knowledgeable, educated, that you feel comfortable with, and that you can pick up the phone and call when you have a question.

The second thing I recommend you do is to start to really understand your new responsibilities. If you walk away with nothing else from this episode, I think this is one of the most important takeaways here. Your role as a partner is qualitatively a different job than the job you had before. We tend to think of going from associate to partner or associate to counsel to partner as a natural progression. It's not.

First of all, not everybody gets there, and one of the reasons not everybody gets there is because they don't recognize that it's a different job description and start changing their behavior at the associate or counsel level to learn what it means to be a partner. Whether you've already been essentially doing the job of a partner or not, it's important that you recognize that this is not simply about what you were doing before and just doing it at a higher level, although that's part of it.

You're not just practicing law anymore. Your role as a partner now includes law firm leadership, business development, growing the firm, helping to grow the firm, developing talent, and helping retain that talent. Law firms lose a lot of money when they lose their talent. Mentoring others, keeping the people around you happy, keeping clients happy, collecting on the bills, there are a whole bunch of things that you may not have been worrying about before that you now have to concern yourself with.

To prepare yourself, make sure you're familiarizing yourself with the firm's financials, the governance of the firm, the organization's strategic goals. What do you need to know to help the firm thrive? That's about the information piece. What do you need to know to help the firm thrive? What do you need to know so that you can succeed in this new role?

Just recognize also, it's not going to all happen overnight. I'm not suggesting that you need to figure it all out immediately but start by gathering information that's readily available to you. Then keep it at the forefront of your mind that you are learning a new job. You're constantly open to learning more about the firm and your role in it. We'll start talking about some of the roles that I mentioned and how you can start stepping into those roles.

One of the things you can start to do right away if you haven't been doing it already is to invest in relationship building. Building strong relationships with other partners in the firm is critical. Depending on the size of your firm, one of the reasons that you may have made partner is because people in the firm that you don't work with already know you.

They know you, like you, and trust you, or they know of you and your reputation, and they trust the people that have been talking about you so that they were able to vote for your admission into the partnership. The idea is that you can't operate in a silo. It's not just about your practice group. It's not just about the few people that you work with on a regular basis.

Collaborating with other people across the firm, getting to know them, developing relationships with them, finding out what they need, letting them know what you need and how you can deliver value to them, aligning with them, those things are critical to the firm's success, and they're also critical to success.

I've mentioned on this podcast before research from Dr. Heidi Gardner who's at Harvard and a book she wrote, two books she wrote, Smart Collaboration and Smarter Collaboration, Heidi talks about this idea that professional services firms thrive and the individuals themselves thrive when there is tremendous true collaboration across the firm.

She has about 15 years of research that demonstrates that that's true, and much of the research she did was in law firms. The idea is that when people in different practice groups collaborate with each other and work to help the client achieve its goals, the clients tend to stay longer, those relationships are stickier, they don't tend to leave to go somewhere else because they know that everybody across the firm is working together for them.

What that means is that it raises the success of the firm and it also helps the individual lawyers achieve success both from a business development perspective and from an internal perspective. The idea here is to have internal visibility, don't be a best-kept secret. In many ways, you're the new kid in town and you've got to be proactive about meeting partners across the firm and deepening relationships with people.

When you make partner, again, even if it was in the last few years, you may have noticed that others will go on doing business as usual. It's great that you made partner, but they're just going to keep doing what they've always been doing. It's up to you to be proactive, to reach out to them and get to know them, their practice areas, what they've learned over the years about being partner, what they know about the firm.

All of that information gathering that I talked about before is going to be made a lot easier for you if you have people in the firm that you can go to for information or to find out what's really happening. Investing in relationship building is not just for your internal colleagues. It's also about strengthening connections with key clients and actively seeking opportunities to bring in new business.

That leads us into the fourth tip I have for you, which is to really embrace business development. For some people, that's a scary thought. You may already have some business, or you may have no business at all. But either way, it's important to shift your mindset from simply being a service provider, someone who is providing legal services to your clients, to thinking more like an owner.

When you start thinking like an owner, when you wear that different hat, and this is one of those places where it's not a natural progression, going from associate or counsel to partner, it requires an intentional proactive mindset shift where you suddenly realize that, “Hey, wait a minute, I've got to think differently.”

Once you start thinking differently and you think about the things that an owner has to think about, “How are we going to pay the bills? How are we going to meet our payroll? What are our expenses looking like? How do we grow this firm? How do we make sure that we are connecting deeply with our clients and providing them exceptional service?” It will enable you to start thinking about how to do those things, how to grow the firm.

When you think like an owner, you will recognize that business development is absolutely essential to the firm's success, not just doing good legal work. Once you've shifted that mindset—and it's a process, again, it doesn't happen overnight—you can start developing a personal business development plan and focus on building a sustainable book of business.

There is a lot that goes into that. It's a whole other part of your job description that, as I said before, may seem daunting, but I think is very important for lawyers to start to recognize early on in their new role as partner. If you think about it, in addition to your new role being qualitatively different from your prior role, you've also gone from the top of one pile, you were at the top of the associate pile or the top of the council pile, and you've kind of gone to the bottom of the partner pile.

Now, that doesn't mean that you're not as valuable as another partner, but what it does mean is that you need to start from the bottom and work your way up. When it comes to business development, that means learning the skills of business development. There's the mindset shift, but there also is a very clear set of skills that those who become consistent business developers or rainmakers learn and execute on, on a regular basis.

The primary work I do in my practice is helping lawyers learn how to develop the mindsets and skills and habits of rainmakers. I have some other podcast episodes that I think will be very helpful to you as you start learning those skills, as you start shifting your mindset. I recommend that you listen to two in particular, one of them is called How to Cultivate a Business Development Mindset. That was another one of my solo episodes. Then another is called the Three Essential Pillars of Business Development for Lawyers.

Some people think that either you have it or you don't, either you are a natural business developer or you're not, and that people who are big extroverts or the life of the party are going to be the ones who can easily develop business. While it may be that some people are more natural at it than others, I'm here to tell you that based on my 16-plus years of experience working with lawyers on business development, it is something that can be learned.

But it doesn't happen by itself because while you're running around billing time and trying to find your place as a partner, you're not necessarily paying attention to those business development skills. Make it part of your job description, decide that you are going to learn those skills, that you are going to become a consistent business developer, and start seeking out the information you need, and then conduct what I like to call mini experiments to see what works for you and what doesn't work for you.

The fifth tip I have for you is to be very proactive about mastering time management. I think for many lawyers, this is the bane of our existence because we only get paid when we bill hours.

The billable hour becomes more important than everything else. It's understandable if that's your mindset, but it's not desirable because in your role as partner, you are now going to be responsible for business development activities, for business development, for growing a book of business, and you're also going to become more responsible for taking on administrative responsibilities, whether you're on a committee, chairing a committee, running a practice group, running the firm, whatever it may be, it's time-consuming.

Yes, you have to keep billing the hours, but you also now have to create time, schedule time, and protect time for the other important to-dos on your list. One of the things to do is to simply schedule what I like to call “power hours” or “power blocks”, where you're setting aside time for important matters.

Now, obviously, you're not always going to be able to plan when these things happen. Somebody has an emergency, or somebody calls a meeting, or a client wants you or somebody in an administrative role wants you, you may have to drop what you're doing and attend to that.

Having said that, it can be very helpful to set aside blocks of time to work on things that are very important but not urgent. If you are a regular listener to this podcast, you'll know that I talk a lot about how the things that are very urgent, they're ringing, pinging, and dinging in our lives take over from the things that are important.

It's up to you to make sure that you are setting aside time to focus on things that are important. That could be strategic planning for the firm. That could be strategic career planning for yourself which definitely includes business development, that could include building your team, mentoring, and sponsoring.

None of those things are billable in the traditional sense. Now, I do recommend that you bill all of that time so you know where your time is going and you are able to share with your partners what you've been working on so they can see the value you deliver in the form of non-billable time.

But it's really important that you set that time aside. Create those power blocks in your schedule. It could be a half hour a week, it could be an hour a week. Decide what you're going to do with those power blocks. Treat those power blocks as client appointments, respect your own time, and make them happen.

Don't just keep pushing them to the bottom of the list. The reason this is so important is that the things that are super important to you but are not urgent at any given moment, as I say, can get pushed off over and over and over again because you keep saying to yourself, "Well, it's not urgent. I don't have to do it this second."

Then days, weeks, months, and years go by and you suddenly realize that you haven't focused on the things that are really important to you because they never became a current emergency. Don't let that happen to you. Protect your time, schedule time, and create time for the things that are important to you.

As part of time management, delegating effectively becomes super important. Whatever your billable rate, you should not be spending your time on administrative tasks or other tasks that somebody else who bills at a lower rate or gets paid a salary could be doing.

It's very hard for many lawyers to delegate effectively because the idea seems to be that if I want something done right, I have to do it myself. But now that you've been elevated to partner, that just doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make sense to you personally. It's not going to help you achieve your goals.

Think about it for a minute. How many partners do you know who are sitting up in the middle of the night proofreading documents or sitting up late at night doing things that an associate could be doing, or a paralegal could be doing, or an administrative assistant could be doing?

That's no longer your role. In addition to taking on new roles, part of it is letting go of roles that are no longer serving you. Some of that is going to be learning to delegate and letting go of the tasks that you no longer need to be doing. Ask yourself the question, "What is the highest and best use of my time? What does the firm want me to be focusing on?

If you can't figure it out for yourself or you're reluctant to focus on some of those higher-level things because you're still used to focusing on some of the lower-level things, step into that owner role again. Put that owner hat on and ask yourself the question, "What does the firm want me to be doing?"

At the risk of stating the obvious, the firm wants you to be billing your time at a high level and doing tasks that help the firm grow, help the talent grow, help retain people, and help develop business. Learn to delegate effectively and ensure that you're working on high-value tasks.

Tip number six, make sure that you have a deep understanding of law firm economics. I find that for most lawyers who become partners, this is still a black box. It's not like when we were associates, the partners were coming to us and explaining to us how the firm runs. Explaining to us what kind of debt the firm has or what kind of lines of credit the firm has, how we get paid, when we get paid, all of those sorts of things.

It's important for you to understand the firm's revenue model. What does the revenue model look like? Where's the business coming from? What parts of the business are most profitable? Is your practice group one of the most profitable? Is there a way to make it more profitable? What does the partner compensation structure look like? What are the key financial metrics that the firm uses to gauge success and to make decisions about where they are going to invest in the future?

Even if you are not technically an owner of the firm, if you are a nonequity or income partner, it is critical that you learn how this works, particularly if you have aspirations of becoming an equity partner at some point. Having this information is going to help make you a better decision-maker.

It's going to help you make decisions about your own practice, and about your own team that help you align with what the firm is trying to do. When you are called upon to help the firm make decisions about what's coming next, you're going to be a lot better about helping make those decisions that are going to align with the firm's long-term success goals, the challenges that the firm may be experiencing, and the firm's profitability.

There are still many partners, even equity partners, that to some extent put their heads in the sand and don't know what the reality is. Especially smaller law firms, boutique law firms, where many of the partners figure that if there's money in the bank and you're paying your obligations as they become due, everything's okay.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If there's money in the bank and you're paying your obligations as they become due, that's certainly a good thing, but it doesn't mean that the future is rosy and it doesn't mean that the firm is on solid footing. It just means that you're holding your head above water.

Understand law firm economics. If you have to do some reading on it, you have to listen to some podcasts about it, you have to sit down with somebody at the firm to understand how it all works, do it. But you are now a partner of the firm. It's up to you to know this stuff and not to wait around for somebody to come explain it to you.

The last tip for today, tip number seven, is all about developing your own leadership skills. People talk about leadership skills a lot, and if you Google the term leadership, you'll come up with quite literally billions of hits. There's no one way to be a leader, and there's no one definition of leadership that is probably going to satisfy everyone.

But it's pretty clear that when you become a partner in the firm, other people are looking to you for leadership, and that's going to come from those who are junior to you, as well as those who are senior to you. It's up to you to hone your skills in leading and managing. Those are not typically the same thing. In some ways, managing is about getting the trains to run on time, making sure the work gets done, making sure the people get paid, and making sure that everybody's doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Leading is sometimes about managing, but it's more about helping your team, helping your practice group, and helping your firm move with confidence into an uncertain future. You need to develop skills in managing, leading, creating teams, mentoring people, and nurturing that team around you. How do you do that?

For starters, recognize that you are now a leader. Whether you feel like one or not, you're now a leader and others are looking to you for guidance, support, and inspiration. Be willing to step into that role even if you're not entirely confident that you know exactly what you're doing.

Secondly, develop self-awareness. This is a good time to be really honest with yourself. What are your strengths? Own them. You don't have to be shy about it. I know what my strengths are, especially at this stage of the game. What can you lean into? What can you rely on?

Also, be honest with yourself. What are your blind spots? What are your areas of improvement? I know those for myself as well. It's not always fun to look at those, but it's important that you recognize them. There's no reason here to beat yourself up about it. Nobody can be good at everything.

What can you try to do differently to see if it works better? As you're making these inquiries, keep in mind that you don't have to figure all of this stuff out yourself. You can invest in leadership training or coaching, or you invest in business development training or coaching that can help you learn and help you grow.

Those coaches or leaders shouldn't tell you exactly what to do, but they should help you figure out what's going to be a good fit for you. As I said, there are tons of leadership books out there and tons of hits on Google. You're going to have to figure out what makes sense for you so that you can leverage your strengths, that you can try to smooth over some of those blind spots, and that you can build a team around you that can help you succeed.

The important thing here is not to put your head in the sand and to recognize that you're in a new role and you've got to do something different in order to succeed in that next role.

The primary takeaway here today is the role you had as a lawyer prior to making a partner and the role you have now that you are a partner are fundamentally different from one another. Success in your former role, which you unquestionably have achieved, you wouldn't be here if you hadn't, does not automatically lead to success in your newer role.

I'm not here to scare you, it's just the reality. It's important that you look at the reality, that you go in with your eyes wide open. It's not a natural progression, it requires thought, it requires planning, it requires intentionality and it requires a mindset shift so that you think like a partner, act like a partner, learn like a partner, as well as a pivot in your behaviors.

There's the mindset shift piece as well as the change in your behaviors, and the actions you choose to take. Be proactive now. Take this list of suggestions and turn it into a to-do list for yourself. It's going to happen over time. It doesn't have to happen by tomorrow.

But as somebody said to me when I was starting to grow my business, nobody's coming to save you. Nobody's coming to hold your hand and do it for you. There will be people there who will help you as you take up the mantle and run with it, I think I'm mixing a lot of metaphors here, but you get the idea, but it's up to you to be proactive about it and make a decision that this is something that you're going to pursue.

By the way, this is the kind of work we do with our clients, whether it's individual coaching, group coaching, or our programs like Lawyers Making Rain or the Ignite Women's Business Development Accelerator.

If any of this resonated with you today, I'd love to have a chat with you. If you're interested, you can reach out to me at elise@thelawyersedge.com or just go to our website, thelawyersedge.com. In any event, thanks so much for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.

Thank you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.