It is no secret that both the number and the value of lateral transfers have been exploding in recent years, yet there still does not seem to be a concrete answer on how to keep them around. At the 2026 LMA Mid-Atlantic conference, Passle's CEO, James Barclay and Craig Budner (CEO, Budner Performance Group) gave insight on the building blocks for your firm's answer. Their findings are built off of the Passle + BPG roundtable with more than 40 senior legal marketers, business developers, and lateral integration professionals who joined us a few weeks ago in New York City to discuss how top law firms are approaching this issue. 

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As a refresher on the numbers that have been flying around, the average cost of bringing a lateral in is $1.5 million per person and in the last year there have been over 4,100 lateral partner transfers in AM Law 200 firms (a 19.6% increase since last year). Even with the investment poured into the attorneys, over 50% of them either leave or fail to meet firm expectations within 5 years. That is 3 billion dollars every year that is lost because lateral partners are not integrated correctly. 

So where does it start? A lot more was covered in the talk, but these were the critical few. 

1. Onboarding vs Integration 

Understanding the difference between onboarding and integration is a key part of BD's role in bringing a lateral into the firm. BD's involvement should not end with onboarding. When that happens, it gets much harder to evaluate the lateral's progress because all you have is the lagging indicator of the business they bring in. A major part of this is ownership of the integration role. Firms need to have a system for accountability in the integration process to prevent parties from backing out when it gets hard. 

2. Gut Feel to Data-Driven Insights 

The 90-day checkpoint is commonly cited as being the inflection point of integration; if they are not integrated by then, chances are they will not integrate fully at all. One idea that James brought up was the ‘spidey sense’ that the BD team would have around the success of the lateral long before that 90-day mark, but would lack the data to back up the gut feeling. Developing leading indicators to identify and rectify issues before it is too late is essential. 

3. Incremental Change 

These changes do not happen overnight, and you cannot go in with the mindset that one change will make all the difference. They need to be smaller touchpoints in service to the greater goal of having them fully integrated. Some mentioned during the talk were:

1. Internal meetings 
2. Travel and entertainment expenses 
3. Speaking engagements

While they are not a guarantee of success on their own, combining the small wins leads to it being much less of a coin flip.

The lateral integration issues are being taken more seriously now than ever before, with firms creating new roles based entirely on laterals both on the recruitment and integration side. Developing and adopting systems that better integrate a lateral alongside the expertise provided by the BD teams can save millions of dollars every year for a firm and with the amount of later transfers continually increasing, the financial risk of ignoring grows as well.