I've been watching the NBA since I was about ten. For years, I was a diehard Celtics fan. If you weren't playing for Boston, I generally wasn't that interested.
The first player I remember changing that for me was Andre Iguodala when he was on the Philadelphia 76ers. I started caring about him for his own sake. He had nothing to do with the Celtics. I just wanted to watch him play.
Then Kevin Durant took that to a whole different level. He had nothing to do with Boston either. I wanted to watch him, follow his career and see what he could do with the people around him. The team he played for wasn't the main reason I cared.
Part of that attachment comes from watching somebody do something extraordinary and wanting to see what they do next. Then social media gives you more of their personality. You hear how they think, what matters to them and what they're trying to accomplish. You start getting attached to the person.
Eventually, I found myself just as interested, sometimes more interested, in individual players who had nothing to do with the Celtics. Even when they were playing against Boston. Which is a pretty interesting change for somebody who used to dismiss basically everyone outside that organization.
And overseeing the basketball version of all this is UChicago-trained attorney and former Cravath associate turned NBA commissioner Adam Silver.
Back in 2018, Silver described players using social media to show fans more of their personalities and interests beyond basketball, and the NBA encouraging them to express themselves. That helps explain how you can develop an attachment to a player that has very little to do with the team they're on.
And lately, I keep looking at Big Law and thinking about what happens when the person becomes the main attraction, and the institution has to compete to keep them.
The team that comes to mind is the Oklahoma City Thunder of the early 2010s, when Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and James Harden were together.
If you don't follow basketball, here's why that team was so important. At point guard, Oklahoma City had Russell Westbrook. At shooting guard, James Harden. At small forward, Kevin Durant. All three were still early in their NBA careers.
Durant was already the team's established superstar, an exceptionally gifted scorer. Westbrook was a star in his own right, an explosive guard who could drive an entire offense. Harden was an emerging star coming off the bench, which meant he usually entered the game as a substitute. He could score and create opportunities for everyone around him, but he hadn't yet had the chance to lead a team of his own.
All three went on to win the NBA's Most Valuable Player award, the league's highest individual regular-season honor. Durant won in 2014, Westbrook in 2017 and Harden in 2018. One organization had helped develop three players who would each reach that level.
They reached the NBA Finals, the championship series, together in 2012. Imagine a firm developing three young lawyers who each go on to become one of the industry's defining rainmakers. That's the kind of talent we're talking about.
And eventually, all three were playing somewhere else.
They left in different ways. Harden was traded to Houston in 2012 after he and the Thunder couldn't agree on a contract extension. Durant chose Golden State in free agency in 2016. Westbrook helped push for a move to Houston in 2019. Reporting at the time described him telling Oklahoma City's management that he would welcome a trade and strongly favoring Houston.
The Thunder eventually rebuilt into a championship team. I'll come back to how, because the trades gave them something a law firm usually doesn't get when its stars leave.
But think about the position the organization was in. You can identify extraordinary people, help them develop and build something really impressive together. That doesn't mean you get to keep them for the rest of their careers. And when they go, some of the interest and loyalty attached to them goes too.
That's what changed in the way I followed the league. I used to get interested in players because they played for my team. Increasingly, I was paying attention to other teams because of the people playing for them. Social media makes that relationship easier to maintain when somebody moves. Sports Illustrated was documenting how Instagram brought fans directly into players' lives back in 2018.
And I think something very similar is happening with the most valuable partners in Big Law.
We spend so much time talking about firms as institutions. Their histories, their reputations, where they sit in the rankings. But I think we often give the institution credit for value that depends heavily on particular people continuing to choose it.
But then a few important people leave, and you start to see how much of what made that firm attractive was actually tied to those people. The clients trusted them. Younger lawyers wanted to work with them. Other partners were building practices alongside them.
The name on the building hasn't changed. A lot of what people valued about working there might have.
Following the player instead of the team
That's what I mean by the NBA-ification of Big Law. I think the balance of power is moving toward the people who can bring an audience, a client relationship or an exceptional group of colleagues with them. The most compelling players can become the reason somebody cares about a team at all. The most valuable partners can become the reason a client hires a firm.
Once that person has several places where they could do their best work, the institution has to keep earning their commitment. Its history alone may not be enough.
Think about following a player from the time they're a rookie. You've watched them develop, struggle, figure things out and become somebody important. By the time they move to another team, you have years invested in their story. You're probably more interested in where they go next than you would be if you'd just discovered them yesterday.
Now think about the general counsel who went to law school with a particular lawyer, or worked alongside them when they were both associates. Years later, one is a partner and the other is in a position to hire outside counsel. There's already familiarity there. Maybe you've seen how they handle pressure. Maybe you know they'll tell you something you don't want to hear before it becomes a much bigger problem.
If they're the right lawyer for the matter, that history can make you much more inclined to send the work their way. A different firm name on their email signature doesn't erase years of knowing how they think.
Obviously, watching a player on Instagram isn't the same as sitting beside a lawyer through a difficult deal. One relationship can be entirely one-sided; the other can involve years of working together. But in both cases, the attachment has had time to build around the person. Their next organization gets a chance to benefit from something it didn't create.
Players don't own their fans, and lawyers don't own their clients. In both cases, the person on the other side gets to decide whether the relationship continues. Moving legal work just involves more practical constraints, including conflicts, fees, staffing and ongoing matters.
But the personal trust is still there. And a partner doesn't need a huge public following for that trust to have enormous value. Their audience might be a relatively small number of people who control a lot of legal work.
The way those relationships get built looks different, but I think the comparison holds up. Think Instagram for NBA players, and LinkedIn and direct email for law-firm partners.
A player can keep showing up in your feed between games. A partner might post an analysis on LinkedIn, send a client something relevant to their business or follow up directly after an important development. Both have ways to stay connected to people between the moments when they're actually performing the work.
Both worlds have podcasts too. Think about All the Smoke, hosted by former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson. You hear players tell their own stories, explain how they see the game and show you more of who they are. You can develop an attachment that goes well beyond watching them play.
Major law firms and their partners use podcasts and other audio content to explain evolving legal issues and what those developments mean for clients. It's a way to be useful, let people hear how you think and build familiarity with more people than you could reach through individual conversations. Someone may have been listening to your judgment for months before they ever pick up the phone to call you.
And those relationships have real economic value. Fans watch games, buy tickets and merchandise, and create attention that matters to broadcasters and sponsors. Clients hire lawyers and bring them the next matter. A team or firm may collect the revenue, but the person can be the reason the customer showed up. That gives the individual bargaining power, especially when the relationship can survive a change of organizations.
A partner doesn't need a million followers for that to work. A thoughtful email to the right client can matter much more than a post that everybody sees.
The relationship can also outlast the institution where it started. If a player changes teams, you can still follow them. If a partner changes firms, a client can still know how they think, trust their judgment and want to work with them, subject to the practical issues involved in moving the work.
And the institutions benefit from these individual relationships too. A firm can attract work because one of its partners has become a trusted voice in a particular market. It also has to recognize that some of that trust may travel with the person.
I do think we can get a little nostalgic about how loyal everybody supposedly used to be. Stars moved in earlier generations too, and some of the stability reflected rules that gave players fewer options. The players' union dates the expansion of unrestricted free agency to 1988.
Think about Magic Johnson with the Lakers and Larry Bird with the Celtics. In the 1980s, the NBA built its promotion around their personalities and rivalry, giving fans two individual stars to get invested in. The players' union's own history describes individual-player marketing as part of the league's growth strategy by 1984. So this has been developing for a long time.
There is a concrete economic effect here too. In a study published in 2022, economist Scott Kaplan found that resale ticket listing prices fell when particular superstars were announced to be missing a game. The effects for LeBron James and Stephen Curry were especially large at away games. People in another team's city were willing to pay more to see those individuals.
The same franchises were still on the ticket. Part of what people were paying for was the person. That's the value I'm interested in: the demand an exceptional individual can bring with them, and what happens to the organization when that individual leaves.
And the sports comparison in law has been around for a while too. John Coffee at my alma mater, Columbia Law School, was comparing star lawyers to NBA and NFL free agents back in 2020. More recently, Liane Jackson described in Forbes how partners think about who else is on the team and what they might be able to accomplish somewhere else.
What interests me is what happens to everyone around those stars once they have those options.
What happens when practice leaders leave
NALP's matched sample of 305 U.S. offices and firms recorded a 17.8% increase in partner lateral hiring in 2025 over 2024. Among respondents from firms with more than 1,000 lawyers, the increase was 10.1%. That's the reporting sample, not every partner move in the country. The broader lateral market was also recovering from declines in 2022 and 2023. Still, there's real competition for established partners.
I think we should spend at least as much time asking who those partners are as counting how many left.
A practice leader can be the person bringing in work, developing younger lawyers, sorting out disagreements and convincing everybody that the group is going somewhere. Sometimes they're the reason other talented people are still there.
You can give somebody else the title. It takes longer to replace the relationships.
That's also why a firm's financial results can look reasonably good and the people inside it can still be worried. Those numbers describe what the firm did with the people it had. If some of the people you were counting on are leaving, you're now trying to figure out what your own future looks like without them.
Maybe you weren't interested in moving six months ago. Now the person who brought you into the group is gone, two of the people you work with most are interviewing, and you're wondering who is going to bring in the work next year.
An offer from another firm starts to look different in that situation.
And this is where Big Law can be more unforgiving than basketball. An NBA player can be worried about who's left on the roster. An equity partner may have that same concern while also watching their share of the firm's profits shrink. Equity partners are owners, and the people who stay may still be covering costs that haven't gone away. That gives the decision to stay another financial dimension.
John Morley's research on law-firm collapses describes how that can turn into a run. A damaging departure makes staying less attractive for other partners. Some of them leave, which changes the calculation again for whoever remains. His review covered 37 major firm collapses from 1988 through 2014. It helps explain how the process can happen; it doesn't tell us which firm is going to fail next.
You don't need everybody to think the firm is doomed. You can have a series of people making individually understandable decisions that collectively make the place weaker.
Of course, a firm doesn't need to keep every partner at any price. Sometimes a departure makes room for other people and leaves the firm better off, just as a team can improve by moving on from an expensive player. The warning sign is losing someone whose relationships bring in important work and help keep the group together. That's when one departure can make others more likely to follow.
Now, let's come back to the Thunder. Losing those stars wasn't the end of the organization. Oklahoma City went on to win its first championship in 2025. But part of what helped it rebuild was getting something back when it traded valuable players.
The Harden trade brought players and draft picks. The Westbrook trade brought Chris Paul and draft assets. And a separate 2019 trade of another star, Paul George, brought Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the pick Oklahoma City used on Jalen Williams. Those two became central to the next great Thunder team. The organization still had to make good decisions and develop its players, but it had resources to work with.
A law firm generally doesn't get another excellent partner and a couple of promising associates in exchange for the rainmaker who just left. There are no draft picks coming back. Coffee made this point years ago: you can hire the people who make a firm valuable without buying the firm itself.
The closer comparison is Durant leaving outright in free agency. The team loses the player without receiving a trade package. For a law firm, a major partner's departure can also put client relationships and the rest of the group in play. The remaining partners at that firm might be able to step into the leadership void, reassure clients and hold the group together. But competitors can see that the group may be vulnerable and start offering those same partners a lot of money to leave, too. So the firm is trying to rebuild around people who may be weighing their own exits.
That's what can make this so brutal for an organization. It spent years helping build something valuable, and the next firm can hire the people at the center of it without sending anything back to help rebuild.
If a firm actually disappears, I think about Vancouver losing the Grizzlies or Seattle losing the SuperSonics. People built careers, relationships and part of their identities around an institution. Then the institution they knew was gone.
And the parallel goes beyond how that feels. Vancouver had years of losing, declining attendance and financial pressure before the Grizzlies moved to Memphis in 2001. Seattle spent years dealing with ownership changes and disputes over arena funding and the team's lease before the Sonics left in 2008. Those problems had a history long before the final announcement.
That's very similar to what happened at Stroock and what we're now seeing at Weil. Major departures and strategic problems accumulated before the final stretch. Stroock lost its restructuring team in 2022 and went through unsuccessful merger efforts before dissolving in 2023. Weil had been losing important practice leaders and struggling to keep pace with competitors before the departures accelerated and it announced plans to wind down.
The ending can feel sudden even when the pressures have been building for years. You can know an institution has problems and still believe it will find a way through them. Then, in a much shorter period, the remaining options fall away.
The Grizzlies and Sonics continued in other cities, with the Sonics becoming the Thunder. But their original communities still lost the institutions they had known. That combination of a long buildup and a devastating final break is what makes the comparison to a law firm coming apart so compelling to me.
Big Law doesn't have a salary cap
And the market for law-firm partners can be even crazier than the one Silver oversees.
The NBA has a salary cap, limits on individual salaries and rules about how long contracts can run. There are exceptions and plenty of complexity, but the league and the National Basketball Players Association negotiate a system everybody operates within.
Big Law doesn't have an industry-wide salary cap, standardized contract-length rules or a players' association bargaining across the partner market. If a firm wants to make an enormous offer, it doesn't have to find room under a salary cap first. It has to decide whether it can afford the deal, whether its partners will accept it and whether the person is worth the investment.
That doesn't mean partners have no contracts or obligations. They have partnership agreements. Some have compensation guarantees lasting several years. Professional duties matter, and notice provisions have to respect clients' choices and lawyers' ethical obligations. But those arrangements vary by firm. There's no common league rulebook setting pay or contract lengths across the partner market.
I also think the basketball comparison helps explain why firms can get into trouble by paying attention only to the most visible person.
A great team needs people who do different things well. Somebody has to defend. Somebody has to make the pass. Somebody has to hit the shot when the defense is focused on the star.
Take the Knicks' 2026 championship team. Jalen Brunson was the star and ultimately won Finals MVP. But think about how much depended on OG Anunoby in Game 4 against San Antonio.
In the final seconds, Anunoby blocked De'Aaron Fox's layup to give New York another chance. Then Brunson missed a three, and Anunoby got to the basket and tipped it in with 1.2 seconds left. The Knicks won by one.
Anunoby scored 33 points that night. Calling him part of the supporting cast doesn't really capture what he contributed. Brunson took the three, but Anunoby had helped create the opportunity and then finished the play when the shot didn't fall.
I think anyone who has worked in a law firm can recognize that dynamic. The rainmaker might be the reason the client walked in. The tax partner who finds a way to get the deal done, or the specialist who catches the issue everyone else missed, can be the reason the client leaves happy and comes back. Those relationships depend on work that extends well beyond the person getting the most credit.
Calling somebody a service partner doesn't tell you how valuable they are. Some of those lawyers have important client relationships themselves. Others make the whole group better in ways that don't show up neatly in origination credit. If you keep rewarding the person who gets the attention while neglecting the people making the work possible, eventually you have a problem.
Harden is interesting here too. He won the 2012 Sixth Man award, recognizing a leading player who usually entered games as a substitute. Houston then made him a centerpiece, and in 2018 he was named the Most Valuable Player in the entire NBA.
I think that's worth remembering before we decide somebody is only capable of being the supporting person. Sometimes that's the role available to them where they are.
And the star needs the right people too. In a 2023 study, Thomson Reuters examined 109 partners who had moved between firms within the previous one to three years. They came from a group of lawyers nominated by clients for outstanding work. Fifty-nine percent had moved as part of a team. The research also highlighted culture, the quality of the practice and opportunities to grow. About half the group was U.S.-based, so it isn't a census of American partners. But it helps explain why reducing all of this to whoever offers the biggest check misses a lot.
Durant's own explanation of his 2016 move emphasized growth and development. Even someone that talented cared about the environment he was joining.
How much does the firm name still matter?
Of course the Lakers and Celtics have enormous value as institutions. The Celtics' majority sale in 2025 was agreed at an initial franchise valuation of $6.1 billion. The Lakers' latest announced deal, in August 2026, puts the franchise at a reported $12.5 billion, with NBA approval still pending. Those are values for the whole teams, not just the ownership stakes changing hands.
Those numbers aren't coming from nowhere. These franchises have history, local ties and generations of people who care about them. Their markets, media rights and place in the NBA have value too. That can survive a bad season or the departure of a great player.
But I think a big part of their prestige is sustained by exceptional players continuing to want to be part of it. The history means something to those players. They want to add their names to it. That helps the team attract talent, and the talent gives the next generation a reason to care about the team. Those things can keep reinforcing each other for a very long time.
Now, what happens if the players start caring less about that history? If they believe they can build their audience, get paid and accomplish what they want somewhere else, how much does the name still help you keep them?
I don't think the brand disappears overnight. But if the best players stop wanting to be there, I think its standing can erode much faster than the people relying on that history expect. A franchise can still be worth billions while becoming less important to the players and fans creating the most excitement. The sale price doesn't answer the question of who wants to be part of its future.
That's the question I keep coming back to with law firms. For generations, names like Cravath, Wachtell and Skadden have carried enormous weight. There's real history and exceptional work behind that. But their prestige also depends on the best lawyers continuing to respect those names and want to build careers there.
A prestigious name can help a young lawyer get established. An established partner with deep client relationships, a strong team and several credible offers may have less need for that particular name than the firm has for them. If enough of those people start seeing their futures somewhere else, the institution has a problem. No one's immune just because the name has always been impressive.
If a firm's best recruiting argument is that great people used to work there, while the people everyone wants to work with now are leaving, the reputation can start describing its past better than its present. The next generation of lawyers and clients has other places to go.
A good firm has to keep giving those people reasons to choose it. That means the right colleagues, opportunities, support and economics.
That doesn't mean you should pay any price for a famous partner. Their clients may not follow. The team may not work well together. The economics may be terrible. You can hurt a firm by refusing to invest in its people, and you can hurt it by spending too much on the wrong people.
The part I care about most is what this means for the lawyers who aren't negotiating those huge packages.
An associate might have joined because of a particular mentor. A younger partner might have spent years building alongside a practice leader. They made a decision based on the people who were there and the opportunities those people could help create.
Then that group starts coming apart, and they're left trying to work out what to do.
I don't think it's fair to look at somebody in that position and say they chose poorly. The place may have changed substantially since they joined. They still have the prestigious name on their résumé, but the people, training and opportunities that made them want to be there may be gone.
That's why this matters beyond the fascination with how much one partner is getting paid. Those moves affect who gets trained, who gets opportunities and who has somebody senior looking out for them. There are a lot of careers attached to these decisions.
I think the most valuable partners can have a similar relationship with their firms. The client wants them. Other lawyers want to work with them. They can make another institution more attractive simply by deciding to go there.
The question for a firm is how much of that loyalty it could keep if those people left. A great history gives you a head start. The people building the next chapter still have to want to do it with you.
I'm still a Celtics fan. But there are always going to be players who make me care about a team I otherwise wouldn't spend much time thinking about. I'll follow those players wherever they go... so long as it's not to the Lakers.