If you’re a partner thinking about leaving your firm, you probably know the nightmare. You hand in your resignation, set up shop somewhere new, and suddenly your phone stops ringing. That fear deserves to be taken seriously. And when you look at the actual data, it gets a better answer than you’d expect.
It’s uncomfortable to face this first fact, but ignoring it won’t help you make good decisions. When partners leave for new firms, not every client comes along for the ride. According to Decipher, a due-diligence firm that vets lateral partner hires for a living, partners said in 2024 that about 57% of their clients would follow them, down from 75% in 2018. The numbers Decipher can actually verify are even lower. If someone tells you that you’ll take every client with you, they’re probably selling you a story.
So yes, firms are right to say client portability isn’t guaranteed. But they’re wrong about what that really means for you.
The fear pictures your clients standing still
The nightmare assumes your clients are just sitting tight, loyal to the firm until someone convinces them otherwise. Look at what’s actually happening in the market and you’ll find the opposite.
A recent Thomson Reuters report shows that corporate clients spent less per hour on legal help in 2025 than in 2024, even though big firms raised their rates by more than 7%. In plain English, rates went up, but the average cost clients paid went down. The only way that’s possible is if clients are moving their business to more affordable firms. And they are. Midsize firms saw a nearly 5% jump in demand in the back half of 2025, while the biggest firms grew less than 2%, the widest gap between tiers since the financial crisis. The rate spread explains it. Average Am Law 100 rates have crossed $1,000 an hour while similar work at other firms averages closer to $600, and general counsel have noticed.
The quick takeaway is this. Your clients aren’t just thinking about moving their business. They’re already doing it, at a pace the industry hasn’t seen in nearly twenty years. Whether they’d leave a big platform stopped being hypothetical. It’s happening right now, whether you stay or go.
The price attaches to the lawyer
Another common fear is that only the big firm’s name on the letterhead lets you charge premium rates. The market is telling a different story.
The most expensive disclosed lawyers in America right now aren’t at the biggest firms. They’re at Susman Godfrey, a boutique litigation shop of about two hundred lawyers, where two partners billed $4,000 an hour in 2026, up from $3,000 the year before. That’s more than the top partners at Latham & Watkins, one of the biggest names in the business, whose highest disclosed rate was $3,050 an hour in recent bankruptcy filings. Across the board, big-firm rates went up around 7% last year, and Am Law 100 increases have pushed past 10% into 2026.
Put those facts together. Big firms keep hiking their prices, but the highest-paid lawyers in the market are individuals at a smaller firm. Clients aren’t paying $4,000 an hour for a fancy lobby. They’re paying for the person. The value attaches to the lawyer, and the platform just decides what the rate has to carry. At a big firm, your rate covers real estate and layers of overhead. At your own firm, you can price your services for the client, not the building. Or you can keep your rate exactly the same and let the client save the difference. Either way, it becomes a better conversation, especially now that clients are shopping around more than they have in decades.
You don’t need every client to come with you
The honest math looks like this. The data says if you leave, some of your clients will follow, but not all of them. The good news is that the clients who do move are looking for exactly the kind of firm you’d build. And you don’t need every dollar from your old book to make it work. The lower overhead of a new firm means a smaller slice of your business, billed at rates your clients experience as relief, can cover what big-firm math would call impossible.
So maybe the real question isn’t whether every single client comes with you. It’s whether enough of them do, and whether you’re positioned to catch the business that’s already on the move. On that front, 2026 has made things pretty clear. It’s not your clients who are standing still.