How Do You Progress To A Managing Partner?

When it comes to any career, your ultimate goal, in many cases, is to try and work your way up to the highest position possible. In U.K. law, the end-game here is becoming a managing partner. However, as it is for many of these types of positions, there’s a finite amount of managing partner roles, not enough for every single person who works in the legal field. In order to improve your chances of reaching that point, you not only need to understand what a partner is, but what you can do to raise your chances.

The Role of a Partner

If you’re having trouble understanding how important a managing partner is for the health of a law firm, consider what it is comparable to in other companies: a CEO. Once you make partner, you transfer from being a traditional salaried employee who needs to perform their duty as best as they can to a higher role directly connected to the profits and liabilities of the firm. Becoming a managing partner versus a senior partner means that you have a far more active role in terms of preparing and executing strategy. In addition, you are also serving as a major representative of the firm. In essence, a managing partner is the one position that can sink a law firm if the wrong person has the job. This is why it’s so important to work to prove you are the right person.

Becoming a Partner

It’s important to think in the long-term when it comes to making partner. You not only need to prove your value as a worker but also your worth in other ways. One major way to do this is to not only build client relationships for your firm but also with yourself. If you are trying to leverage your skills, it’s a lot easier to prove that if you are doing business on your own. Make sure that you have a referral network that not only generates clients for yourself but potentially others. Leadership in a firm will not want to let that go away if push comes to serve.

This is a major part of what helps you become as appealing as possible to various firms: having a proper following. Since this is a front-facing position as a company, you not only want to be doing well behind the scenes but have a good image on the main stage as well. This means having a positive public profile. When you have these two main factors for a prolonged period of time, it’s time to start putting feelers out for a partner position, whether it’s at your current firm or elsewhere.

Is your firm having trouble finding skilled candidates for partners from within? If your prospects seem low, you may want to reevaluate what you have. A great way to see your staff in a new light is by enlisting a consulting service like Symphony Legal. We provide both in-house training to help your staff refine and improve their skills, as well as consulting services in order to help improve your business in order to draw potential partners in from the outside as well.