Paul Karvanis spoke to many law firm leaders for his book about how young lawyers can make partner
Relentless improvement, not early brilliance, is what keeps lawyers ahead of rising expectations, Paul Karvanis argues. For associates who want long careers rather than brief flashes of success, the real differentiator is how quickly they learn, adapt and use feedback – not how polished they look in year one.
Karvanis spent nearly 12 years inside what he calls “high-performance environments” on Bay Street, in-house and in the public sector before walking away from practice to coach lawyers and write about sustainable high performance. In his latest project, The Successful Associate: From New Lawyer to Making Partner, he interviewed almost 50 managing partners, chief people officers, talent directors and department heads to understand which associates rise and which quietly stall.
What emerged is a hard-edged hierarchy of associate success that begins with basic competence but ends in business impact. At the base of his pyramid is the simple, unforgiving requirement to deliver excellent work every time. “The foundation of the pyramid is quality work and reliability,” he says. “If you can’t do quality work reliably, nothing else matters.” For partners under pressure, trust in an associate’s work product is not a bonus; it is the price of admission.
That foundation, however, does not win promotions on its own. Among the juniors who consistently hit that baseline, the next dividing line is how they show up in rooms and on files. As Karvanis puts it, “among those juniors who are doing quality work reliably, some of them are differentiated from others on their soft skills. So can they meet people, can they walk into a room and read the room? Can they know when it’s time to offer their idea? And, more importantly, know when it’s time to keep their mouth shut?”
Those skills are about understanding the expectations, often unspoken, that govern how work flows and whose judgment gets trusted when the stakes rise. Associates who learn to read those dynamics and who adjust how they communicate become the people senior lawyers want on the file, even when others have similar legal skills.
The third layer of his hierarchy is calibrated ownership. Once an associate has demonstrated reliable work and emotional intelligence, the question becomes whether they make life easier or harder for the people above them. Healthy ownership, Karvanis says, starts with a blunt conversation with the assigning lawyer: “What does it look like for this to be helpful for you? Obviously, I’m going to do a great job, and I’m going to keep all my promises about getting it done when I say I’m going to, but how can I make this even more useful?”
That might mean drafting the client email along with the research memo, thinking through next steps on a deal rather than waiting for instructions, or quietly tracking loose ends on a file and closing them without being asked. The line between initiative and overreach is not fixed; it depends on the senior’s risk tolerance, the client’s expectations and how much review buffer sits between the associate and the outside world.
For many lawyers, the barrier is not a willingness to own more but fear of getting it wrong, and the profession’s uneasy relationship with feedback does not help. Karvanis rejects the idea that lawyers are uniquely fragile, but he does think many are carrying a heavy internal load. “When you’re hard on yourself, you’re carrying more of a load,” he says. “You’re starting out with a hundred-pound weight on your back,” which means every piece of criticism feels heavier than it needs to.
That internal harshness can turn even well-meant comments into a story about failure. “You can easily take the constructive feedback and make it negative, but it doesn’t need to be,” he says. For firms that claim to be talent-driven businesses, that is not a cultural side issue; it is a performance drag.
On the associate side, the more subtle trap is what he calls the expectation effect – the way reputation quietly shapes which opportunities show up. One partner he interviewed anonymized work from every associate on an assignment and was “really eye-opening” to see that the supposed superstars were not much better than their peers once names were stripped away, he says. “We often find what we expect to find,” and those expectations begin forming long before anyone sees a draft.
That reality should change how juniors think about every interaction, from a hallway chat to a first pitch meeting. As Karvanis puts it, before a partner ever sees your work, “they are going to have a judgment, an opinion of me, what am I doing that shapes that opinion?” Showing up prepared, carrying a notebook, asking a question that shows you have thought about the client’s problem – all of that is quiet branding, and it determines whose name comes to mind when the next mandate lands.
Even for associates who master the hierarchy, the partner track is no longer a simple reward for time served. When Karvanis asked firm leaders what it now takes to make partner, he heard a sharp divergence. Some still talk about doing good work and putting in the years, but one partner told him, “You need to be bringing in a million dollars of business per year, or you’re not going to make it.”
The common thread is that partnership must make economic sense for the firm. In practices built around institutional clients, the key question is whether an associate becomes the go-to problem solver for those accounts. In practices that depend more on entrepreneurial clients, the bar shifts toward rainmaking and building a portable book of business.
That is why Karvanis keeps returning to relentless improvement as the core of sustainable success. “What will matter most to your long-term success is not how good you are at the start … what matters is how good you are at improving.”
This article is based on an episode of CL Talk, which can also be found here:
The episode can also be found on our CL Talk podcast homepage, which includes links to follow CL Talk on all the major podcast providers.
