Passing on Power in Professional Partnerships: Who Inherits Client Relationships?

Abstract

We analyze internal records of a large law firm to assess whether female partners experience disadvantages in the process of the transfer of responsibility for client relationships across partners. We outline a framework that identifies multiple stages and sources of potential gender-driven biases that may make female partners less likely to “inherit” clients from senior partners. Using the firm’s records, we identify 102 client accounts where internal responsibility (“ownership”) transferred from a senior partner to another partner, and then further identify all the partners who logged work either on projects for those clients or for other clients also owned by the owners of the 102 accounts (the “contenders”). In this sample, we find little evidence of a female partners being at a disadvantage in inheriting a client, relative to male partners. There is no evidence that female partners have less opportunity to work on these transferred clients; no evidence of gender homophily (men favoring men; women favoring women); and no evidence of women needing to work harder than men to inherit a client. There is at best weak residual evidence that female partners, all things equal, are less likely than male partners to inherit a client. We discuss how these findings are both consistent with and yet also inconsistent with prior findings in professional partnerships, suggesting an urgent need for conducting similar analyses in additional firms