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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.
What Does a Legal Recruiter Actually Do? A Plain-English Guide for Attorneys
Thinking about working with a legal recruiter but not sure what it actually involves? This plain-English guide explains how legal recruiters work, what they do for you, what they don't do, and how to tell a good one from a bad one.
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.
Onward Insights - May 2026
Being good at your job is the baseline, not the differentiator. The professionals who advance fastest are not always the most technically impressive in the room. They are the ones with consistent judgment, reliable follow-through, and the ability to make work feel lighter for everyone around them.
The Legal Talent Gap Is Already Here. Firms Are Making It Worse.
Experienced hires now make up the majority of associate recruitment at AmLaw 200 firms for the first time. Law school hiring is down nearly seven points since 2021. Firms are solving a short-term cost problem and building a long-term talent crisis. Here is what the pipeline data actually says.
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.