Originally published on LinkedIn on 28 May 2026.
James was the obvious choice.
Seven years at the firm. Technically excellent and trusted by clients. When the partnership decision came through, nobody was surprised, least of all James.
Six months later, his managing partner called me. Two fee earners had handed in their notice in the same week. A key client had asked, quietly, whether a different partner could lead the relationship going forward. James was putting in more hours than ever and the numbers were still moving in the wrong direction.
Nobody had seen it coming. Looking back, the signals had been visible from the first month.
The promotion changes the game. Nobody changes the playbook.
The skills that make an outstanding fee earner are not the same skills that make an effective leader. This is one of the most consistent and least discussed patterns in professional services.
For seven years, James had been rewarded for personal output. His instinct under pressure was to stay close to the detail and keep the client comfortable. Clients trusted him precisely because of it and the firm promoted him for the same reason.
Once he was leading a team, those same instincts became the problem. He held onto work his fee earners should have owned. His feedback was technically accurate but landed as criticism. He delayed a performance conversation for three months because the relationship felt more fragile than the performance issue. By the time he had the conversation, the fee earner had already started looking elsewhere.
He was doing what had always worked. The difficulty was that the role had changed and the behaviours hadn’t.
What is actually happening in those first 90 days
When a partner is newly promoted, the firm tends to focus on the visible transition: the client base, the caseload, the billing targets. These matter but they are only half of what is happening.
Underneath the surface, the team is running a different process entirely. They are watching and learning what this leader values, what they will challenge and what they will walk past, whether a concern raised early will be welcomed or absorbed in silence. That reading of the leader solidifies quickly. Once it has formed, it becomes the operating culture of the team and it is very difficult to shift.
In my experience, many firms put almost no resource into this transition. They assume that a technically strong fee earner, given a team and a set of targets, will find their way.
Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger identified a pattern that is directly relevant here: the skills required to perform well in a role are often different from the skills required to accurately assess your own performance in it. A newly promoted partner is, almost by definition, in unfamiliar territory. Their instinct is to rely on what worked before. The gap between what they think they are doing and how it is landing on the team is at its widest precisely when it costs the most.
Where the cost accumulates
The financial damage from a poorly managed leadership transition rarely announces itself. It builds across months, in decisions small enough that nobody logs them as a risk.
The write-off approved in thirty seconds because questioning it felt harder than absorbing it. The matter that overran because the new partner stayed too close and the team stopped flagging problems early. The resignation that arrives without warning from someone the firm had spent two years developing.
Industry benchmarking puts the cost of avoidable attrition, reduced productivity and partner time spent firefighting at up to £250 in every £1,000 of revenue. That figure never appears as a line on the P&L because it doesn’t accumulate that way. It seeps through in many places at once.
The Law Society’s most recent workforce data points to sustained attrition among junior and mid-level solicitors as one of the most significant operational risks facing UK firms. In cases I see, the root of the problem sits not in pay or workload alone, but in what happened in the first few months after a leadership transition that nobody examined closely enough.
The shift that changes it
The adjustment most newly promoted partners need to make is smaller than they expect. The standards that got them promoted do not need to change. The technical judgment does not need to change. What needs to shift is something more specific: an understanding of how their presence, under pressure, is landing with the people around them.
A fee earner needs to know how their work lands. A leader needs to know how they land. Those are different skills and the gap between them is where the first 90 days go wrong.
The newly promoted partner who gets honest, structured feedback early has a window that closes faster than most firms realise. At that stage, the adjustment is small. Six months later, once the team has already formed its reading of the leader and the culture has settled around the blind spot, it is a significantly heavier lift.
The question most managing partners haven’t asked yet
Think about the partner you promoted in the last twelve months. You already have a sense of how it is going. The question is whether your sense of it matches what their team would say if you asked them honestly. In the cases I work with, the gap between those two answers is where the cost lives and is almost always addressable, if it’s caught early enough.
James is still at the firm. When I last spoke to his managing partner, she said his team was one of the most settled in the practice. Not the loudest, not the highest billing, but the one where people stayed, work moved cleanly, and problems reached her before they became expensive. None of that came from a training programme. It came from understanding, early enough, what he was doing that he couldn’t see.
The TrustLytics® process starts with a free leadership diagnostic, followed by a series of bespoke calibration sessions, and closes with a team pulse survey to measure what has shifted. I work with firms of 50 to 500 people where leadership behaviour and commercial performance are the same conversation.
If you have a partner who was promoted in the last 12 months, the leadership diagnostic is free. The link is here: https://www.thomastelman.com/leadership-blind-spot-financial-risk-diagnostic