Originally published on LinkedIn on 23 April 2026.
In 2019, I placed two solicitors into a mid-size city firm. Both were excited to join. The firm had interviewed well describing their culture, workload and growth plans. All the right things were said, however within their notice period both wanted out.
When I sat down with them to understand why, the answer wasn’t the work or the pay. It was the gap between what they’d been told and what they’d found. Silos and a culture that looked nothing like the one described in the interview room. A firm that from the outside, appeared to have everything together.
Their experience stopped me in my tracks.
I’d started Thomas Telman as a legal recruitment business but what I came to realise was that I wasn’t solving the real problem, I was moving people around inside it. So, I stopped all recruitment and started asking different questions.
What followed
What came next was years of conversations with managing partners, HR directors, and firm leadership. I wanted to understand why talented people leave firms that, on paper, should be committed to the growth strategy and their personal development.
My work eventually became TrustLytics®, a risk management system for professional services designed to help leaders surface their own blind spots to improve productivity and performance.
I’m sharing this because what I found in 2019 wasn’t unique to that firm. It was and still is a pattern across the sector. The data now confirms this at scale.
The numbers
BigHand’s 2025 research, drawn from over 800 senior law firm leaders across the UK and US, puts a precise figure on what most managing partners already sense but cannot name.
Firm-wide lawyer attrition has reached an average of 27%. The number of associates leaving the profession entirely not just moving firms has jumped from 9% to over 16% in a single year. Losing a third-year associate can cost a firm in excess of $1 million. The research puts this in dollars, but the operational reality is identical in UK firms.
Many firms hand these numbers to HR however the problem is that attrition at this scale isn’t a people problem, it’s a commercial one, and it belongs on a managing partner’s desk sitting next to the P&L.
Sitting underneath these figures is a second dataset that is harder to ignore. Law Care’s Life in the Law Report, drawn from over 1,500 legal professionals, found that 59% reported poor mental wellbeing. The average lawyer scored 44 out of 100, significantly below the UK adult average of 59. The work is taking a toll that most firms are not measuring and most leaders are not seeing.
Many firms already have mechanisms for understanding how their people are doing., such as engagement surveys, annual appraisals, and away days. The problem is not the absence of tools, it’s that every one of them asks people to be honest inside a structure that quietly penalises honesty.
A fee earner does not complete an engagement survey and name their supervising partner. An associate does not use their appraisal to flag that the workload has become unsustainable. The architecture for honesty is absent not because firms don’t care, but because the structures they rely on were never designed to carry it.
What the numbers don’t show
The solicitors I placed in 2019 didn’t leave because the work was challenging. They left because the gap between the firm they’d been shown and the firm they’d joined was wider than they were willing to carry. Nobody had lied to them. The senior leaders simply didn’t have accurate, reliable data on their team’s honest lived experience, so they painted a picture based on their own perspective because it was the only picture available to them.
The firms pulling ahead in 2026 are not pursuing radically different strategies. What separates them is a willingness to examine the parts of their firm that have never been properly looked at.
Every firm has architecture nobody designed. The way work moves between people. The unwritten rules about what gets raised and what gets absorbed. The habits that formed under one set of circumstances and were never questioned when those circumstances changed. Over time, without anyone deciding it, these patterns harden into the operating system of the firm and they remain invisible until the cost of them becomes impossible to ignore.
The decision that was already made
Most firms I speak to are healthy by every external measure. On paper, everything points in the right direction and this was also true of the firm I placed those two solicitors into in 2019.
People don’t leave firms that are visibly broken. They leave leaders who aren’t aware of their blind spots, and they rarely announce it in advance. By the time it shows up in your numbers, the decision has already been made quietly, in a moment small enough that nobody logged it as a risk.
Most managing partners find out what their blind spots were costing them at exactly the moment they can no longer afford not to know.
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