The traditional lockstep compensation model for partners at large law firms is rapidly losing ground, driven by fierce competition in the lateral hiring market.
For decades, lockstep pay meant partners advanced through salary bands based purely on seniority, with individual performance playing little role in determining compensation.
That model is now under serious strain, as firms scramble to retain top-performing partners who can command enormous guarantees by moving to rivals.
Many Biglaw firms have begun adding partner bonus pools designed to reward high performers with a larger share of firm profits, breaking from the egalitarian logic of pure lockstep.
Debevoise and Plimpton, long considered one of the most committed standard-bearers of traditional lockstep compensation, has created a new bonus pool for partners as part of a broader overhaul of its pay system.
Pure lockstep has become increasingly difficult to defend in an era when lateral partner guarantees can reach into the millions, even at firms whose identities were built around the model.
Freshfields, ranked as the world’s 13th largest law firm by gross revenue, introduced a nonequity partner tier in February 2026 while simultaneously stretching its lockstep structure to better reward higher earners.
Freshfields is far from alone in making such a structural shift, with a wave of elite firms following a trail blazed by Cravath, which created a salaried partner tier back in November 2023.
That Cravath move is widely seen as having given other top-ranked firms the confidence to introduce their own nonequity tiers, with Paul Weiss, WilmerHale, Cleary, Skadden, Debevoise, and Sullivan and Cromwell all following suit within two years.
The proliferation of nonequity partner tiers represents a fundamental reordering of how Biglaw firms think about talent retention and internal equity at the partnership level.
Firms that once prided themselves on the simplicity and fairness of lockstep are now acknowledging that a one-size-fits-all approach cannot survive contact with today’s hypercompetitive lateral market.
The trend signals that lockstep compensation, once a defining feature of elite American and international law firm culture, is becoming a relic of a more stable and less mobile legal industry.