Corporate Biglaw Tenure & Exits Among Vault 20 Law Firms
A musing of how long corporate associates typically last in the biglaw gauntlet before moving to greener pastures.
Dataset
The dataset consists of 1,933 corporate associates who left any of the Vault 20 law firms for in-house positions between January 2017 and October 2024. The scope of the dataset is limited to Vault 20 Law Firms for convenience purposes only, and the findings are likely able to be extrapolated to the rest of biglaw firms. The data was compiled and provided by FirmProspects, a resource that tracks lateral and exit movements by law firm associates (likely through web scraping firm websites and LinkedIn for employment information). Consequently, the dataset may not be complete given that not all former associates use or regularly update their LinkedIn profiles. Furthermore, approximately 10 associate data points lacked class year information and were excluded from the analysis.
Considerations
The analysis focuses on “corporate” associates using the practice group filter in the FirmProspects database. The label “Corporate” does not include further sub-classifications, but the label presumably refers to general transactional groups such as M&A and Capital Markets, and appears to include specialist roles that provide deal support (e.g. “Corporate, Real Estate”).
The data only includes associates leaving the Vault 20 firms for in-house positions, rather than the full gamut of “biglaw” (which arguably consists of approximately 100 or so law firms). However, the data includes associates who may have previously worked at other law firms before joining the respective Vault 20 law firms. As such, the data captures associates’ full tenure in “biglaw” before transitioning in-house.
As a note, FirmProspects treats legal secondments as an “exit” from the firm, which skews the tenure metrics downward in the tables below. Additionally, the tenure metric is rounded to the nearest year during data processing. Consequently, the tenure metrics presented in the tables below are not entirely precise.