Law firms are still waging a battle for talent, fighting each other to recruit and retain the best. The latest hiring trend involves large groups moving between firms. Last year’s lateral move highlights showed that this phenomenon was already becoming increasingly common, and it was not confined to the biggest players in New York, Washington DC, or Chicago. On the contrary, it was more often a feature of smaller, but faster growing legal centers. From Atlanta, Dallas and Denver to Boston, Houston and Miami, many firms are looking to grow in cities where they have not previously had boots on the ground.
The same goes for which law firms are embracing group moves – they are not necessarily the biggest players. In size, law firms ranging from Am Law 50 to Am Law 200 have followed the lateral group hiring trend more often.
In 2024, there were several group moves that each involved more than a dozen attorneys switching firms: 14 lawyers changed firms to open a new Denver office, 17 attorneys joined a big name Los Angeles firm, while 18 lawyers moved firms to open an office in Atlanta. In a major foray, one international law firm entered the U.S. legal market in January 2025 by successfully recruiting a 30-strong group of attorneys from two different firms to spearhead their New York and Los Angeles office launches.
Frankly, the rest of this year looks set to deliver a similar glut of big team moves. But for any law firm looking to open a new office in an unfamiliar market, the challenges can be immense. Hiring individuals one at a time often proves to be slow and difficult. Faced with the prospect of dozens of interviews over as many months, the logic of hiring a team is not only compelling, but commercially very appealing.
What managing partners with a plan want most is speed. As firms continue to open new offices across the United States in cities where they see great potential, more legal hubs are being created in more states. The most cost-effective method to launching a new office with instant client appeal is to purchase an entire function or team from another firm. Ideally, that firm should already have a solid foothold and a good local market reputation. If that is the case, then their attorneys should enjoy a similar reputation.
In good measure, lateral partner hiring has been fueled by economic growth. If the U.S. economy proves to be as strong as predicted in the next few years, demand for legal services will continue to flourish. Against this backdrop, a partner being courted by an ambitious law firm may find it relatively easy to bring their best associates with them as a package deal.
Hiring lawyers individually is slower, invariably more time consuming, and usually more expensive. It may also be riskier: there is no concept of team or collegiate culture in a group of individuals hired from diverse law firms. Talented mangers can build teams and maintain collegiality, of course. But it’s hard work and takes time. Whereas a group hire makes a much bigger splash and delivers an instant client offering at scale.
Lateral hiring activity since the start of 2025 has been robust. An Am Law 20 law firm client recently told us: “It’s starting to feel like 2021 again.” Good news since that year proved to the busiest on record for lateral hiring by large law firms.
Recruitment drives are often fueled by transactional activity, as M&A and private equity deals dominate the financial headlines. As the prospect of lower interest rates moves into view, market sentiment is cautiously on the up: despite the immediate focus on tariffs and trade wars, they will materialize at some point. When the Fed decides to start cutting, cheaper borrowing should drive deal activity, especially with business valuations and price-earnings multiples returning to more realistic levels.
Although the economy has yet to take full effect of Trump 2.0, the wider backdrop has helped to boost the legal recruitment market. Ever since last November’s election, lateral hiring activity into corporate and transactional practice groups has surged by comparison to the early months of 2024 when uncertainty prevailed. The origin of this upswing has been largely economic rather than political – as stock markets valuations began to rise in mid-2024, so did the volume of lateral hiring.
Managing partners will recall the record number of lateral associate hires made in 2021 and 2022, particularly by elite Am Law 20 firms in major legal hubs. Things are different this time and the group hire strategy is more prevalent across a much broader swathe of the legal sector as they seek out new opportunities in new frontiers. Recruitment is finally starting to feel how it felt a few years back, but better – for law firms with big ambitions, these are good times.
