The Aspiring Lateral: Money Talks

Levenfeld Pearlstein will be authoring a new series of articles to be published on the legal website Above the Law. The article series, titled, “The Aspiring Lateral,” will analyze a variety of issues surrounding lateral moves, drawing on the firm’s experience in the lateral market as well as the individual experiences of LP attorneys.

The first installment of our weekly series is “The Aspiring Lateral: Money Talks,” written by Peter Donati, head of the firm’s Labor & Employment Group.

From the article:

We’ve been conditioned to believe that lateral moves are all about money. Popular thinking — which may not be far from the truth — holds that law firms, held in collective thrall by the American Lawyer’s profit-per-partner numbers, focus on lateral hiring as the first step in a virtuous cycle that will increase their PPP metric, in turn attract more profitable laterals, and so on and so on. Laterals themselves, meanwhile, are viewed as economic actors lured away from their firms primarily through the prospect of increased, or guaranteed, compensation. 

Read the full article here.