Questions to Ask Law Firm Partners
Questions for law students, summer associates, and lateral candidates sitting across from a partner, covering how work is assigned, what a junior actually does, billable expectations, the partnership track, client concentration, and what makes someone here succeed or quietly stop being staffed.
20 questions, each with the reason to ask it · includes a conversation guide
The questions
Open any question to see why it works.
- 1
What does your practice actually consist of week to week?
Practice group names hide enormous variation. A litigator may spend most of the year on discovery and none in court. Ask what the last three matters were and you get the real job description rather than the website version.
- 2
How did you end up in this group?
Almost nobody chose their practice area deliberately at your stage, and partners enjoy saying so. The answer also tells you how flexible the firm is about moving between groups, which is the thing you are really asking about.
- 3
What does a first-year in this group do in the first six months?
You want tasks, not adjectives. Document review, research memos, cite checking, first drafts of motions, and diligence checklists are all different educations. Ask what proportion of that first year is each one.
- 4
How does work get assigned here?
A free-market system means you must hustle for staffing and can starve while looking busy. A coordinator system means you get fed but choose less. Ask which it is in practice, not on paper, because most firms describe themselves as balanced and are not.
- 5
Who reviews a junior's work, and how does feedback usually arrive?
Feedback that only exists in an annual review is not training. Ask whether partners mark up drafts and return them, or send changes to the client without comment. The second pattern is common and is how associates plateau without knowing it.
- 6
What is the billable target, and what counts toward it?
The headline number means little without knowing whether pro bono, business development, training, and non-billable firm work count. A lower target that excludes everything can be harder to hit than a higher one that includes pro bono hours.
- 7
What does a busy month look like compared with a slow one?
Averages hide the shape of the year. Ask for the worst month recently and the quietest, and how much notice people get before a matter goes intense. Predictability, not hours, is usually what determines whether people burn out.
- 8
What type of work do you have too much of right now and not enough people for?
This is the most practical question a junior candidate can ask, because it tells you where you would be useful immediately. It also reveals whether the group is growing or covering for departures.
- 9
How much client contact does a junior get, and when does that start?
Some groups put associates on client calls in month two, others shield them for years. Early exposure is how you learn what clients actually want, and it is the strongest predictor of whether you can build your own relationships later.
- 10
What training exists beyond learning on live matters?
Ask for specifics: deposition workshops, drafting programmes, secondments to clients. Firms that invest in structured training tend to be the ones that expect associates to stay, which is a useful signal in itself.
- 11
How do people here build their own client relationships, and when does that begin to matter?
Origination determines partnership at most firms and nobody tells juniors this clearly. Ask when the firm starts expecting it and whether existing partners share credit, since a firm where nobody shares origination is a hard place to make partner.
- 12
What does the path to partner look like now, and how has it changed since you went through it?
The second half is the important half. Non-equity tiers, longer tracks, and counsel roles have reshaped many firms, and a partner comparing their own route to today's is giving you a candid picture without being asked to criticise anyone.
- 13
What happens to people who do not make partner?
A firm with strong client placements for departing senior associates is a different proposition from one where people simply disappear. Ask where the last two people who left this group went, which is concrete and easy to answer.
- 14
What happened in this group the last time work slowed down?
Every practice has cycles. The answer tells you whether the firm redeploys people, reduces hiring, or runs quiet layoffs, and that difference is worth more than any number in the offer letter.
- 15
How does partner compensation work here?
Lockstep systems reward collaboration and tolerate a slow year. Origination-weighted systems reward rainmaking and can make senior partners protective of clients, which affects how much responsibility juniors are given. Ask which behaviour the system produces.
- 16
How concentrated is this group's work among its largest clients?
A group where one client is most of the revenue is stable until it is not. You are asking about your own risk, and framing it as a question about the group rather than the firm makes it comfortable to answer.
- 17
What has made an associate stand out to you?
The answers are rarely about legal brilliance. Partners tend to describe responsiveness, ownership of a task through to the end, and telling them bad news early. Those are learnable, and hearing them named tells you what the firm actually rewards.
- 18
What makes you stop giving someone work?
This is the sharper twin of the previous question and it is where you learn the real failure modes: missed deadlines, work that needs rewriting, going quiet under pressure. Partners answer it more honestly than you expect.
- 19
How does the firm handle it when someone makes a serious mistake?
Every lawyer will eventually miss something. Whether the culture is to fix it as a team or to find the person responsible determines how quickly problems surface. Ask for an example, described without names.
- 20
What do you wish someone had told you at my stage?
A good closing question because it lets a partner be generous rather than evaluative. The answers tend to be about choosing a mentor, saying no, or not confusing the firm's prestige with your own progress.
Talking to partners
Practical guidance for the conversation itself.
Adjust for the setting
Adjust for the setting
In a callback interview
You have twenty minutes and the partner is also selling. Lead with the work questions, since those get real answers, and save compensation and partnership track for the recruiting contact who is paid to answer them without judging you for asking.
As a summer associate
You already have the offer in most cases, so use the summer to ask the assignment and feedback questions of several partners in different groups. Contradictory answers about how work is assigned tell you more than any single answer.
As a lateral candidate
Ask the client concentration, compensation structure, and origination credit questions directly. At lateral level these are ordinary business questions, and a partner who deflects all three is telling you the numbers do not support the pitch.
What to listen for
What to listen for
- Whether the partner describes juniors by name and by what they are good at, or only as a resource pool.
- Whether hours are described as intense but predictable, or genuinely unpredictable. The second is what drives people out.
- How they talk about associates who left. Bitterness about departures usually predicts how you would be discussed later.
- Whether they can describe the practice's next two years or only its last big matter.
- Whether anyone mentions the same two or three names as the people who train juniors. If nobody is named, training is theoretical.
Questions that will not serve you here
Questions that will not serve you here
- Anything answered on the firm website, such as office locations or headline practice areas.
- Asking a partner to compare the firm to a named competitor, which puts them in an awkward position and produces a rehearsed line.
- Vacation policy as an opener. Ask it, but ask it of an associate or recruiting, and ask whether people actually take it.
- Broad questions about firm culture, which produce the same answer everywhere. Ask about a specific behaviour instead.
- Anything that reveals you have already decided you will not stay past two years, unless you are prepared for that conversation.