Every fall, the word comes. Senior associates and counsel at Am Law 200 firms around the world find out if they made partner, a road they chose almost a decade ago. Some don’t make it on their first try, and many feel the path to shareholder or rainmaker has narrowed for themselves and for the associates behind them.
Robyn Axberg, a mergers and acquisitions partner at Holland & Knight in Chicago, remembers her first unsuccessful application for partnership. “I cried, and then I stopped crying. I went to my practice group section leader, and we went through, ‘What’s the deal? Why was this even close?’” They laid out metrics: hours, originations, collections on owned time. “This is where I started bridging the gap between hours and money collected,” she says. “I tracked it. I sent it to him. We talked a couple times. And I just tried to be strategic about, If this isn’t my year, what is it going to take?”
