Memo
To: Law Firm Partners
From: Nermin, Esq.
Date: June 26, 2026
To: Law Firm Partners
From: Nermin, Esq.
Date: June 26, 2026
Re: Old Guard and New Guard
I know you want this to be Old Guard versus New Guard. That’s the framing every partner reaches for automatically and it’s effecting your relationship with your partners, revenue, and the ability to make decisions that move the firm forward.
The first thing I want you to do is replace that “versus” with an “and.” It sounds like a small thing, almost a semantic trick, but the framing you use to describe the dynamic in your firm or practice group is the framing that determines what events actually occur.
Let me tell you what I see when I walk into firms or practice groups that are around fifteen, twenty, or thirty years old. There are the name founders, and there are the partners who have been there for ten or twelve or fifteen years and have effectively grown up inside the firm. Then there are the newer partners, who often came in laterally from Big Law, or from a government position, or from another firm where they hit a ceiling and wanted equity somewhere they could have influence.
The newer partners show up to meetings with excitement, momentum and ideas, and the existing partners have decades of institutional memory and the relationships that built the book of business that the new partners may now be sharing. On paper, this should be one of the most productive combinations a firm can have. In practice, it almost never plays out that way, because everyone has decided that the dynamic is adversarial before anyone has done anything adversarial.
The existing partners are not bad people or stubborn, just as the new partners are not entitled or green. The reason this happens is psychological and it effects both the existing partners and the new partners. The existing partners built the firm/practice group. They made it through the years where it almost didn’t survive, they took the personal financial risk, and they sat through the partnership meetings where hard decisions had to be made with no certainty. When a newer partner walks in and suggests something should be done differently, the existing partner does not hear a suggestion about a process. The existing partner hears a judgment on the work they spent twenty years doing. The newer partner, on the other side, took a real risk leaving wherever they came from, and they are now several months or a year into meetings where the first three ideas they brought to the table were politely dismissed with some version of “it’s worked so far.” The newer partner is starting to wonder whether they made a mistake, and that wondering is the first step in leaving after eighteen months and taking their book of business with them.
Neither side is acting irrationally given they are seeing it as “us” versus “them.” As long as this stays in place, nothing will change.
Example: The new partner who wants to revisit the comp structure
A new partner joins. She came in laterally, she has a book of business that is growing, and within her first six months she raises the question of whether the firm’s compensation structure could be revisited. She is saying that she thinks it could be better for everyone, including the existing partners, and she has ideas about how.
The existing partners hear the suggestion and the response is some version of, “It’s worked so far. Why fix what isn’t broken?” The new partner tries to clarify that she is not saying it is broken, but the conversation has already moved on to the next agenda item. She brings it up again two months later. The same thing happens. She stops bringing it up.
Here is what each partner in that room is actually doing. The new partner is testing whether this firm is a place where she can have influence proportional to the business she brings in or whether she is going to spend the next decade being told that the way things were done before she arrived is the way things will continue to be done. The existing partners are protecting a structure they built, because revisiting it feels like an admission that the structure might have been imperfect. The managing partner, who could in theory mediate this, is doing the math on which side has more political weight in the room, and the existing partners have more political weight, so the managing partner moves the conversation along.
None of these people are wrong about their own incentives. They are all behaving rationally inside a “versus” framing. And the firm is losing the new partner’s engagement one agenda item at a time, in a way that will not show up in any metric until she announces her departure or stops bringing in new work or stops sending her overflow work to the other partners.
What the “and” framing actually requires
The reframe from “versus” to “and” is not a mindset shift. It is an operational change, and it requires you to do something most firms have never done.
Every partner in your firm has different objectives. One partner wants to hire. Another wants to build out a succession plan for their own exit in five years. A third wants to expand into an adjacent practice area because the area they trained in is going to shrink due to regulatory changes. A fourth wants to revisit how origination is calculated. A fifth wants to invest in expensive technology. These objectives are not “old guard” objectives or “new guard” objectives. They are individual objectives held by individual partners.
The work is to write all of this down. Every objective, every partner, regardless of how senior or how new. Most firms keep this kind of thing in the managing partner’s head or scattered across the minutes of partnership meetings where it gets buried under whatever the urgent issue of the month was. That is a record of what got discussed, not a map of what every partner actually wants.
Once it is written down, you can see something that the “versus” framing made invisible. You can see where partners actually agree, which is almost always more places than anyone realized. You can see where partners genuinely disagree, which is usually fewer places than the political temperature would suggest. And you can see where there are objectives that no one is opposing but no one is actively supporting either, which is where most of the unrealized opportunity in a firm lives. A Venn diagram is one way to visualize this, and I would encourage you to actually draw it, because partners who can see their objectives next to their colleagues’ objectives behave differently than partners who are operating on assumptions about what their colleagues want.
Why the managing partner alone cannot do this
In theory, the managing partner is the person who should be running this exercise. In practice, the managing partner is too close to the politics to do it well. The managing partner has spent years building relationships with the existing partners and is now also responsible for making the new partners feel like they made the right decision joining the firm. Those two responsibilities are in direct tension whenever a “versus” dynamic surfaces, and the managing partner will almost always default to protecting the relationships that have been in place the longest, because those are the relationships that have the most accumulated weight.
This is not a critique of any specific managing partner. It is an observation about what the role requires. The managing partner cannot simultaneously hold the political relationships of the firm together and be the neutral party who names what every partner wants and forces the conversation that produces a decision. Asking one person to do both of those jobs is asking them to fail at one of them, and in my experience, the job that gets sacrificed is the second one.
The firms that handle the old guard and new guard dynamic well have someone in the room who is not protecting any relationship, is not running for re-election as managing partner, and is not worried about which partner they have to sit next to at the firm retreat. That person can name what every partner wants, can put it on the table without weighting it by tenure, and can hold the conversation to a resolution instead of letting it dissolve into the next “let’s revisit this later.”
The question to ask yourself
If you are a partner in a firm where the old guard and new guard framing has taken hold, the question is not whether your colleagues are being unreasonable. The question is whether anyone in your firm right now is capable of writing down what every partner actually wants, putting it in front of the partnership, and holding the room to a decision about what you do with that information. If the answer is no, the next question is which partner is going to leave first because of it.
