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Onward Insights - August 2026
Attorney loyalty is no longer the safest career strategy. This edition of Onward Insights looks at why even Wachtell is losing partners, how Big Law is restructuring around lateral hiring instead of law school pipelines, what recent compensation announcements actually mean once you read past the headline, and what the July 2026 market data signals for attorneys weighing a move.
Associate Mobility Brief - Market Intelligence | JuLY 2026
The associate lateral market posted its first month-over-month increase since March, with 1,126 attorney moves recorded in July - up from June's 1,079. Labor & Employment led all practice areas for the second consecutive month with a net gain of +67, while Corporate turned net-negative for the first time in three months. DC continued to absorb talent at the strongest net rate of any major market, and associates accounted for 52% of all lateral arrivals. Here's what the data signals heading into the back half of Q3.
Onward Insights - July 2026
Global M&A crossed $2.85 trillion and legal employment hit a record for the third straight month. But in a market moving this fast, a big hiring number and real growth are not the same thing. Here is what H1 2026 actually looked like, firm by firm and market by market.
Associate Mobility Brief - Market Intelligence | June 2026
Our June 2026 Market Intelligence Briefing tracks 1,079 attorney lateral moves, highlighting strong momentum in Labor & Employment, steady gains in Litigation and Corporate, and a softening Insurance market. See where legal talent is moving, which law schools are feeding the pipeline, and what it signals for law firm hiring heading into Q3.
Onward Insights - June 2026
What three years of building Onward taught us about searches that stall, hires that last, and why a small team can move better than a large one.
What Law Firm BD Programs Get Wrong - And What It Costs in the Lateral Market
Most law firms don't fail at business development because attorneys resist growth. They fail because the systems they build quietly teach attorneys to avoid it. Here is what that looks like from the lateral market side of the conversation.
What Does a Director of Innovation at a Law Firm Actually Do?
Director of Innovation means something different at every law firm. At some firms it is a technology deployment role. At others it is closer to change management or knowledge management. At others it is a hybrid of all three. These are genuinely different jobs, and firms that write a single job description combining all three versions are the ones whose searches stall or produce the wrong result. This piece covers what the role actually requires, what the strongest candidates look like in practice, and why standard recruiting approaches consistently fail to find them.
How to Build a Knowledge Management Function That Actually Works
Law firms have spent significant money on knowledge management technology in the past five years. Most are not seeing the returns they expected. The problem is almost never the tool. It is the absence of a KM function capable of making the technology actually work. This piece covers the four structural layers every high-performing KM function requires, the hiring sequence that actually matters, and why deploying technology into an environment that was never built to support it is the most consistent reason KM investments underperform.
The Legal Tech Hiring Problem Nobody Wants to Admit
Law firms are competing for a very small group of people who have both technical fluency and real law firm experience. The internal pipeline most firms never built is now the one everyone is chasing, and the traditional recruiting approach is not going to close that gap.
Why Law Firm BD Hires Fail - and What to Do Differently
Law firms have invested more in business development talent over the past decade than at any point in the industry's history. A lot of those hires have not worked out. The failure rate is not a talent supply problem. It is a process problem. This piece covers the five most common BD hiring mistakes at law firms, from writing job descriptions that describe a fantasy candidate to using compensation benchmarks that are no longer competitive, and what a better hiring process actually looks like in practice.
Business Development Roles Look Simple Until You Try to Fill Them
The skills that produce results in corporate BD environments do not transfer automatically into law firms. The gap is about context, not capability. Candidates who succeed inside law firms understand that influence in a partnership flows through relationships rather than authority. They can operate without formal power, without commission structures, and at the pace the partnership sets, without losing the thread of a longer term strategy.
The Candidate Pool for Legal Tech Roles Is Smaller Than Firms Think
The strongest candidates in legal tech are almost uniformly passive. They are embedded in roles where they have built credibility, developed the relationships needed to get things done, and are working on problems that keep them engaged. What makes them consider a move is rarely the job description. It is the conversation, and that conversation has to be specific, honest, and compelling enough to feel worth the disruption of leaving somewhere that already works.