Law firms may be solving today’s efficiency problem while worsening an existing talent shortage.
A fourth-year associate isn’t created in the fourth year. That lawyer is created during years one, two, and three.
That sounds obvious. But as law firms rethink associate hiring, embrace AI, and continue to navigate hybrid and remote work, I wonder whether the profession is paying enough attention to what happens next.
I’ve been recruiting attorneys long enough to have seen a version of this movie before. And I remember what happened.
In some corners of the legal market, we already face a shortage of experienced talent. My concern is what happens if the decisions firms make today narrow that pipeline even further.
We Have Been Here Before
When the Great Recession hit in 2008 and 2009, law firms pulled back dramatically. Associates were laid off. Entry-level hiring collapsed. Offers were deferred. New graduates struggled to find positions.
The numbers were extraordinary. NALP reported that the offer rate to summer associates fell from 89.9% in 2008 to 69.3% in 2009. The Class of 2011 then recorded the lowest employment rate since the Class of 1994, with only 49.5% of employed graduates finding work in private practice.
But statistics tell only part of the story. As a recruiter, I watched what happened to the attorneys themselves.
Young lawyers who might have envisioned careers in corporate law, commercial real estate or other transactional practices couldn’t necessarily find those jobs. They needed to work, so they took the positions that were available.
Collections. Landlord-tenant. Personal injury. Foreclosure. Other practice areas that were hiring.
There was nothing wrong with those practices. But once attorneys accumulated several years of experience in one area, changing direction became increasingly difficult. They became identified by the experience they had, not necessarily the careers they originally intended to build.
And then the market changed again.
Suddenly Everyone Wanted the Three-to-Five-Year Associate
As the economy recovered, law firms started hiring. The calls began coming in.
We need a three-to-five-year corporate associate. We need a three-to-five-year commercial real estate associate. We need an attorney with several years of sophisticated transactional experience.
There was just one problem.
Where were they?
The attorneys who should have been receiving that training during the recession often hadn’t received it. You cannot stop hiring and developing junior attorneys for several years and then suddenly manufacture experienced midlevels when business returns.
Eventually, firms had to adjust. A search that might once have targeted a three-to-five-year associate often had to look at more senior attorneys because those were the lawyers who actually had the required experience.
The pipeline had been interrupted. It took years for the market to begin normalizing.
Then COVID arrived.
COVID Changed Attorney Development Again
The pandemic transformed how lawyers worked almost overnight. Remote work became necessary. Hybrid work followed.
At the same time, associate compensation accelerated dramatically at many large firms as competition for talent intensified. Firms hired aggressively. In some cases, firms expanded the profiles of candidates they were willing to consider because they needed attorneys.
But hiring someone and developing someone are two very different things. That distinction matters.
Before remote and hybrid work became commonplace, much of an associate’s education happened without anyone calling it “training.” A junior attorney sat near a senior associate or partner. They overheard conversations. They watched how a partner handled a difficult client. They sat in on calls. They saw negotiations unfold. They walked into someone’s office with a question. A partner marked up their work and explained why something needed to change. They learned which issues mattered and which didn’t. They watched lawyers exercise judgment.
Some of the most valuable lessons were never scheduled on a calendar. They happened because younger lawyers were present.
Hybrid work does not make good training impossible. Far from it. But firms cannot assume that the development that once occurred organically will continue to occur organically when people are no longer together as often.
Training has to become intentional.
And now another disruption has arrived.
Enter Artificial Intelligence
AI may create the next major change in how junior attorneys are developed. It can research, summarize, review documents, assist with diligence and produce drafts. It can perform, or help perform, many of the tasks traditionally given to junior attorneys.
This is not hypothetical. The Thomson Reuters Institute reports that the share of law firms and legal departments with an enterprise-wide generative-AI tool available rose from about 14% at the start of 2024 to 43% by 2026, and that at the largest organizations it is approaching universal.
From a business perspective, the appeal is understandable. Why have ten first-year associates performing certain tasks if technology allows the work to be completed faster with six?
But there is another question law firms need to ask.
What was the purpose of that junior work?
Yes, it produced billable work. But it did something else. It trained lawyers.
The first draft that wasn’t very good taught the associate how to write the second one. The document review taught them what provisions mattered. The diligence exercise taught them what could derail a transaction. The research assignment taught them how to identify an issue.
The hours spent working beside experienced attorneys taught them something AI cannot simply download into them: judgment.
AI may eliminate or accelerate parts of the work. It does not eliminate the need to develop the lawyer.
The Numbers Are Already Moving
The current hiring data should get the profession’s attention. Citi’s Law Firm Group, as reported by Bloomberg Law, found that two-thirds of large firms expect to hire fewer first-year associates in 2028 than they did in 2025. First-year hiring for the Class of 2025 was already down about 7.5% from the year before.
Here is what makes this different from 2008. That pullback happened in a crisis.
This time, firms are financially strong.
The Thomson Reuters Institute and Georgetown Law reported average firm profit growth of about 13% in 2025, with the strongest demand growth since the global financial crisis. So a smaller junior class today may be a deliberate choice about technology and leverage, not a response to a downturn.
At the same time, the Thomson Reuters Institute found that 78% of law firm professionals believe early-career lawyers depend on experienced mentorship to develop the skills AI is displacing. And the NALP Foundation reports that a record 83% of associates who departed in 2025 did so within five years of hire, up from 80% in 2024.
Think about those trends together. The pipeline isn’t facing one potential disruption. It is facing several at the same time.
We may have fewer junior attorneys entering firms. The junior attorneys who are hired may perform less of the traditional work through which previous generations developed their skills. Some will spend less time physically working beside experienced attorneys. And firms must retain enough of those lawyers long enough for them to become the experienced attorneys the market will eventually need.
This matters even more because, in some practice areas and markets, finding experienced talent is already difficult.
Then move the calendar forward.
What Happens in Three to Five Years?
It is 2030 or 2031. A client calls a law firm with a sophisticated transaction. The partner needs someone who can take significant responsibility for the matter. The firm calls its recruiting department or an outside recruiter.
“We need a fourth-year corporate associate. We need someone who can run significant portions of a deal. We need someone who can work directly with the client. We need someone who doesn’t require a lot of training.”
My question is simple:
Where is that attorney supposed to come from?
A fourth-year associate isn’t created in the fourth year. That lawyer was created during the previous three years.
Someone gave that attorney increasingly sophisticated assignments. Someone reviewed the work. Someone explained the mistakes. Someone brought that associate onto client calls. Someone allowed them to observe negotiations. Someone taught them when to push and when not to. Someone let them watch experienced lawyers practice law.
AI may help that attorney become more efficient. It cannot substitute for all of those experiences.
The Talent Shortage Isn’t Entirely in the Future
In some ways, we are already there.
As a recruiter, I already see how difficult it can be to find attorneys with the combination of experience, judgment and client skills firms want. A firm may know exactly what it needs on paper. Finding an attorney who actually has that experience can be another matter.
That is why I don’t view this simply as a prediction about a talent shortage five years from now.
The question is whether today’s changes will make an existing problem worse.
If fewer junior attorneys enter the pipeline, if AI changes the work through which they traditionally learned, if mentorship becomes less organic, and if significant numbers leave before reaching the midlevel ranks, the pool of experienced attorneys doesn’t expand simply because firms need it to.
And the consequences go well beyond associate recruiting.
This Becomes a Succession Problem
Today’s junior and midlevel associates should become tomorrow’s senior associates and partners. Some should become practice leaders. Some should become rainmakers. Some should inherit important institutional clients. Some should eventually become the attorneys responsible for training the generation behind them.
That makes this a succession issue.
Succession requires a successor.
A senior attorney can spend decades building a practice, developing client relationships and creating a valuable book of business. When the time comes to transition those relationships, there has to be someone prepared to take them over.
That lawyer needs more than technical ability. Clients have to know them. They have to trust them. The successor needs judgment, leadership skills and enough experience to step into relationships that may have taken the senior attorney twenty or thirty years to build.
That development cannot begin six months before a partner wants to retire.
It happens over years.
If firms are developing fewer attorneys today, the consequences could eventually land directly on senior attorneys who are counting on the next generation to continue their practices and protect the client relationships they spent their careers building.
A succession plan without a prepared successor isn’t much of a succession plan.
And this isn’t only about retirement. A strong succession pipeline gives senior attorneys options. It can help preserve client relationships, protect the value of a practice, create leadership continuity and make a firm less dependent on any one individual.
An associate development problem eventually becomes a succession problem. And a succession problem can become a client-retention problem.
You Cannot Buy Your Way Out of Every Talent Shortage
There is another interesting development occurring at the same time. Large firms are competing intensely for established partners and rainmakers, with some lateral packages reportedly reaching extraordinary levels.
The market is placing enormous value on attorneys who already have clients, relationships, judgment and proven books of business. That makes sense.
But every rainmaker was once a junior attorney. Every practice leader was once an associate who needed someone to teach them. Every trusted adviser once had to learn how to become one.
Law firms can recruit experienced lawyers from competitors. They can pay premiums for scarce talent. They can acquire groups. They can merge.
But the entire profession cannot solve a pipeline shortage by recruiting from one another.
At some point, somebody has to develop the lawyers everyone wants to hire.
AI Isn’t the Problem
AI is going to change legal practice. It should. Technology that allows lawyers to work more efficiently should be embraced thoughtfully.
Hybrid work isn’t inherently the problem either.
The risk is assuming that because the way legal work is performed has changed, the way lawyers develop no longer matters.
It may matter more.
If AI performs more of the repetitive work junior attorneys once handled, firms need to deliberately identify what those assignments were teaching and create new ways to teach those skills.
If associates spend fewer days in the office, firms need to make mentorship and exposure intentional rather than incidental.
If firms hire smaller incoming classes, they need to understand what those smaller classes mean for their talent needs five, ten and fifteen years from now.
And if firms are losing associates before they reach the midlevel ranks, retention has to become part of the development conversation as well.
Because history has already shown us what happens when the pipeline is interrupted.
The shortage doesn’t necessarily appear immediately. It appears several years later, when everyone starts looking for experience that nobody spent the previous several years developing.
The Question Law Firm Leaders Should Be Asking
The conversation surrounding AI tends to focus on what technology can do today. How many hours can it save? How much work can it automate? How will it affect leverage? How many junior attorneys will firms need?
Those are legitimate business questions.
But there is another question that deserves equal attention:
Who are we developing for tomorrow?
Because when a law firm needs a talented fifth-year associate in 2031, the answer cannot be: “We should have trained one in 2026.”
And when a senior partner is ready to transition a twenty- or thirty-year client relationship, the answer cannot be: “Now we need to find someone.”
Law firms don’t just need to ask how many associates they need today. They need to ask who will become their midlevels, their senior attorneys, their partners, their practice leaders and ultimately the successors to the lawyers and client relationships that built their firms.
The talent shortage isn’t entirely a problem waiting for us in 2031. In parts of the legal market, it is already here.
The question is what happens if we make it worse.
Who’s Driving Your Career?™
Shari Davidson, CPC
President, On Balance Search Consultants LLC
Further Reading
NALP Foundation, Update on Associate Attrition (Calendar Year 2025), April 21, 2026
A record 83% of associates who departed in 2025 left within five years of hire, up from 80% in 2024, with overall attrition around 19%.
Thomson Reuters Institute & Georgetown Law, 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market, January 7, 2026
Average firm profit growth of about 13% in 2025, the strongest demand growth since the global financial crisis, and worked rates up 7.3%.
Thomson Reuters Institute, 2026 AI in Professional Services Report, 2026
The share of law firms and legal departments with an enterprise-wide generative-AI tool available rose from about 14% at the start of 2024 to 43% by 2026, approaching universal at the largest organizations.
Thomson Reuters Institute, Future of Professionals 2026 (Legal Report), 2026
78% of law firm professionals believe early-career lawyers depend on experienced mentorship to develop the skills AI is displacing.
Bloomberg Law, reporting the Citi Law Firm Group survey, September 2026
Two-thirds of large firms expect to hire fewer first-year associates in 2028 than in 2025; first-year hiring for the Class of 2025 was down about 7.5% year over year.
NALP, Perspectives on Fall 2010 Law Student Recruiting / Entry-Level Recruiting Volumes Plunge, 2010
The offer rate to summer associates fell from 89.9% in 2008 to 69.3% in 2009, one measure of how sharply entry-level recruiting contracted during the recession.
NALP, Class of 2011 Has Lowest Employment Rate Since Class of 1994, 2012
Only 49.5% of employed 2011 graduates obtained jobs in private practice, the lowest such share NALP had measured in decades.
Reuters, Is Big Law Paying Too Much for Star Partners?, September 15, 2026
Reporting on very large lateral partner compensation packages and research suggesting many lateral hires do not meet their firms’ financial projections.
