The challenge of underperforming senior equity partners
Debbie Dudley
Director
Date published: 21/09/2026
In the modern law firm, senior equity partners often operate as autonomous principalities rather than corporate employees. By virtue of an exceptional track record, these individuals frequently hold exclusive custody of the firm’s most critical knowledge-based resources: irreplaceable specialist expertise, deeply entrenched client relationships that secure the firm’s core revenue streams, and a powerful market reputation that elevates the entire corporate brand. They also typically have trusted, longstanding relationships within the firm, informal alliances where Partners have significant influence, and unspoken agreements to ‘have each other’s back’. Their concentrated control gives them immense informal and formal power, translating directly into total operational autonomy. They do not merely work within the hierarchy; they command a personal leverage that shields them from traditional top-down management structures. In other words, because they have power, they can resist any attempt to control them.
Consequently, when such a partner begins to underperform, managing partners face an extraordinarily delicate and politically dangerous dilemma. Because the firm’s governance relies on “ambiguous authority” and a fragile peer consensus, attempting to aggressively manage or discipline a low-performing heavyweight can easily trigger a backlash. It risks fracturing internal alliances, provoking a defection of lucrative clients, or alienating other senior partners who view managerial intervention as a threat to their own independence. For a Managing Partner, dealing with underperformance at this elite level is rarely a straightforward HR or financial correction; it is a diplomatic negotiation that can destabilise the Partnership’s entire power balance, making it feel insurmountable. The difficulty is that this comes at a high cost to the firm and to Partners who are high-performers. It therefore must be addressed as a priority.
To compound this, the overall management of Partner Performance is often undermined by key challenges, common to many firms:
- Objectives are often poorly defined during the annual goal-setting process
- In-flight reviews either don’t take place or are infrequent, and can be ineffective in highlighting performance shortfalls
- Lack of effective coaching of Partners to support them in achieving their goals or remedying any performance shortfalls
- Leadership often find it challenging to hold Partners to account for their commitments at year-end assessments
- Inconsistent moderation of performance assessment within and across teams
Addressing poor performance was consistently the lowest-rated review in 4 surveys of Partners and Leaders in professional services firms since 2015.1
1 Source: 2026 Equity Partner Contribution & Compensation Survey.
How we support you to address these challenges:
- Establishing yourself as a leader – helping newly promoted leaders, elevated from the Partner ranks, to establish their confidence and authority with their former peers, by developing self-awareness of their own leadership style:
- exploring how they are perceived by others
- how their team’s expectations and perceptions of them have changed
- understanding how and why they need to establish and maintain a certain level of “distance” from their former peers.
- Effective goal-setting skills – supporting leaders to develop the skills necessary to establish well-defined and clearly measurable goals that strike the right balance between individual and team performance and are calibrated to the financial and strategic contributions required of their team.
- Managing conflict and challenging conversations – equipping Partners with the skills and tools to provide challenging and constructive feedback. Our experience at this level includes strategies to manage conversations where the feedback recipient could be angry, emotional, passive-aggressive or defensive.