That includes young people looking for jobs at firms. No longer is the key question during an interview, "when will I make partner?" but instead, "what, exactly, does making partner mean?"
In some cases, becoming partner can include a rather toxic contract, Young says. Some firms force lawyers to sign agreements that penalize them for leaving the partnership. Young knows of firms, for example, that require partners to agree to forfeit all of their capital contributions from the previous year should they decide to leave.
Yet still, the term "partner" holds sway. And as long as a partnership also means a pay increase, its associated cachet will stick around. Even though the contracts have changed, the status hasn't. It's like the logo on a polo shirt, Young says. It's a holdover from the traditional system, and it's something to tell your parents, or use to impress people at a cocktail party.
"We are a society that recognizes pedigree steps along the way," says Michael Serino, executive director of Human Capital Development at Cornell's Industrial and Labor Relations School. That's especially true for the kind of person competing to make partner at a top law firm, who has probably been raised on accolades they've received for various educational and professional achievements.
But context is also important: being a partner doesn't only matter internally, Riskin says: "It's not just ego, it's really positioning -- it affects the way this individual will be perceived professionally." Clients, on the whole, prefer to work with partners, regardless of the compensation agreements behind the curtain.
That being said, the workforce is changing. Younger people want different things from their jobs than employees who have been at firms longer. Generally, new hires at firms are less interested in loyalty to one company long-term, and more interested in building a career that supports their value system. That tends to mean more job-hopping, which is less conducive to a system that requires paying dues at one firm for years until making partner.
On the flip side, many young people entering legal or financial firms are taking those jobs at a time when there simply isn't an excess of equity and funding to divvy up between people, which somewhat starves the old partnership model.
"I don't think there are any givens anymore, and perhaps the old model had more givens," Serino says. "The people that navigate that successfully have to reconsider the assumptions and constantly be ready to anticipate how workplace market conditions are going to change." In other words, young people at big firms will need to redefine the old milestones.
