An insider’s view of the practices, lawyers and firms driving Boston’s lateral market

If you spend enough time talking to Boston lawyers, law firm leaders and recruiting committees, one thing becomes clear pretty quickly: the Boston lateral market is busy – but it is not indiscriminate.

There are plenty of firms hiring. There are plenty of attorneys interested in moving. And there is more lateral activity than we have seen in years.

But the lawyers who are generating the most interest are not necessarily the lawyers who are most actively looking.

The market is increasingly being driven by strategic hiring: firms identifying a practice they want to build, a client segment they want to penetrate, or a lawyer they believe can materially change the trajectory of an existing group.

That distinction matters. From my perspective, the interesting question is no longer simply, “Who is hiring in Boston?” It is: Why are they hiring, and which lawyers actually solve the problem they are trying to solve?

Boston Is One of the Most Active Lateral Markets in the Country

NALP reported a 156% increase in overall lateral hiring in Boston in 2025 among cities with at least 30 lateral hires. Lateral associate hiring increased 138.9%. That puts Boston in a very different position from a market that is merely experiencing normal turnover.

At the national level, the Am Law 200 hired 13,214 lateral attorneys in 2025, while lateral partner hiring reached 3,009 – its highest level in five years. Litigation was the largest practice area for lateral hiring across levels. And the market remains aggressive in 2026.

The result is a Boston market where firms are competing against one another for talent while simultaneously competing against other firms’ platforms.

That last point is important. A partner isn’t just deciding whether to leave Firm A for Firm B. They are evaluating:

• Platform
• Compensation
• Conflicts
• Client portability
• Associate support
• Billing rates
• Origination credit
• Cross-selling opportunities
• Practice-group culture
• Management structure
• Long-term succession
• And, increasingly, the firm’s overall strategic direction

We thrive to understand all of those variables rather than simply making introductions.

Where the Action Is

Private Equity, M&A and Corporate

If I were advising a law firm about where to spend recruiting resources in Boston, sophisticated transactional talent would remain high on the list.

Boston has an unusually attractive combination of private equity, venture capital, life sciences, technology and financial-services clients. That creates a particularly fertile environment for corporate lawyers.

But there is an important distinction between a lawyer who works on PE transactions and a lawyer who owns relationships with PE sponsors. Firms increasingly understand the difference.

The senior associate with excellent deal experience is highly marketable. The partner with excellent deal experience and three or four meaningful sponsor relationships is a different proposition entirely. That is where the economics of lateral hiring become much more aggressive.

Boston firms don’t simply need corporate lawyers. They need lawyers connected to the sources of corporate work.

Life Sciences Is Still Boston’s Secret Weapon

Every discussion of Boston legal recruiting eventually comes back to life sciences. And for good reason.

The concentration of biotechnology, pharmaceutical, medical-device, healthcare and venture-backed companies creates demand across virtually every major practice. That includes:

• Life sciences M&A
• Licensing
• Patent litigation
• Patent prosecution
• FDA and regulatory
• Healthcare transactions
• Commercial litigation
• Product liability
• Employment
• Privacy
• White collar
• Corporate governance

The best candidates frequently sit at the intersection of two disciplines. A corporate lawyer who understands biotech transactions is more interesting than a generic corporate lawyer. A patent litigator who understands the commercial realities of a life sciences client is more interesting than a generic patent litigator. A regulatory lawyer who can sit comfortably with a sophisticated healthcare business is more interesting than a lawyer who simply knows the regulations.

Industry knowledge has become a recruiting currency.

Litigation Is a Major Recruiting Battleground

Litigation deserves special attention. Nationally, litigation was the largest category of lateral hiring across the Am Law 200 in 2025. In Boston, that translates into a broad range of opportunities.

Commercial litigation remains important, but the market is particularly interesting around:

• White collar
• Government investigations
• Securities
• Antitrust
• IP litigation
• Complex commercial disputes
• Arbitration
• Financial-services litigation
• Class actions

The partner market is especially compelling. A litigator with a genuinely portable book, strong institutional clients and a differentiated specialty can command attention from firms that might otherwise have little reason to add another litigation partner.

There is also an interesting opportunity below the partner level. The 5th-to-8th-year litigator with excellent writing, sophisticated case experience and a strong pedigree can be surprisingly difficult to find. Those lawyers are often already busy. They are not necessarily responding to job advertisements. They are listening to recruiters.

That distinction is at the heart of effective legal search.

The Real Partner Market Is About Portability

There is perhaps no greater misconception about lateral partner recruiting than the idea that compensation alone drives the market. It doesn’t.

Compensation gets someone’s attention. The platform closes the deal.

For partners, the conversation increasingly revolves around what can actually move. Firms want to understand:

• Which clients belong to the lawyer?
• Which clients belong to the existing firm?
• What percentage of the book is genuinely portable?
• How much revenue has the lawyer generated?
• What is the historical growth rate?
• What are the billing rates?
• How concentrated is the book?
• Are there conflicts?
• What associates and partners need to move?
• What cross-selling opportunities exist?
• What will the practice look like three years from now?

And increasingly, firms are questioning the assumptions behind a lateral business case. That is understandable. Reuters reported in September 2026 that industry data suggests only approximately 20% to 30% of lateral hires meet financial projections in their first one to two years, while more than half of lateral partners in separate research leave within five years.

That doesn’t mean firms are becoming less aggressive. It means they are becoming more sophisticated about what they are buying.

The Most Interesting Candidates Are Often the Ones Who Aren’t Looking

This is where our role becomes particularly important.

The Boston lawyer who has updated their resume and applied to five firms is visible to everyone. The lawyer who has been at the same firm for eight years, has a strong client base, is undercompensated relative to the market and has quietly become frustrated with the firm’s direction is much more interesting.

That lawyer may never respond to a job posting. They may not even believe they are a candidate. But a conversation about a specific platform can change that.

This is particularly true for partners. The best partner searches are often market-mapping exercises before they are recruiting exercises.

• Who represents the major PE sponsors?
• Who represents the fastest-growing biotech companies?
• Which litigation partners have the institutional relationships?
• Which practices are overleveraged?
• Which firms have succession issues?
• Which partners have recently become frustrated with compensation?
• Which groups have been built around one rainmaker?
• Which associates are reaching the point where they need a different platform?

That is where the intelligence lives.

Associate Recruiting Is Getting More Surgical

The associate market is active, but firms are not necessarily looking for volume. They are looking for the right experience.

The strongest lateral associate profiles tend to be concentrated around the middle of the class-year spectrum. Why? Because a 4th-, 5th- or 6th-year associate can often hit the ground running. The firm doesn’t have to teach them how to be a lawyer. It needs to teach them how the firm operates. That is a much easier proposition.

The challenge is that these attorneys are also the most difficult to recruit. They have enough experience to be valuable. They are still young enough to have substantial runway. And many have already received significant retention incentives from their current firms.

Boutique vs. BigLaw: An Underappreciated Part of the Market

One of the more interesting Boston trends is the continuing fluidity between large firms and specialized firms. A lawyer does not necessarily move from an Am Law 50 firm to an Am Law 20 firm. Moves increasingly occur in both directions.

Partners leave large firms for boutiques because they want greater control, economics or autonomy. Others leave boutiques for larger platforms because they want institutional clients, broader geographic reach or greater infrastructure.

Boston’s strong middle-market firm ecosystem makes this particularly relevant. The job is matching the lawyer to the platform – not matching the resume to the most prestigious logo.

National Firms Are Watching Boston Carefully

Another major dynamic is the continued willingness of national firms to enter or expand in Boston. That changes the competitive landscape for everyone.

A new entrant doesn’t necessarily need to build a Boston office organically. It can acquire a team. And when a firm hires a partner with a team, client relationships and institutional knowledge can move quickly.

For established Boston firms, that creates a retention issue. The question isn’t merely “Can we hire good people?” It is “Can we prevent someone else from hiring ours?”

What Firms Are Really Buying

After enough lateral conversations, a pattern emerges. Firms say they are looking for “excellent lawyers.” That is true – but incomplete.

What they are really buying is one of four things:

1. Revenue – the lawyer brings clients and matters.
2. Expertise – the lawyer has a capability the firm cannot easily build internally.
3. Strategic positioning – the lawyer gives the firm credibility in an industry or practice it wants to penetrate.
4. Future growth – the lawyer is positioned to become a meaningful producer over the next five to ten years.

The strongest candidates check two or three of those boxes. The exceptional candidates check all four.

What This Means for Candidates

For Boston attorneys, the current market creates significant opportunity – but timing matters. A candidate should not wait until they are unhappy enough to leave before understanding their market value.

Partners should know what their practice is worth. Associates should know which firms value their experience. And both should understand the difference between a firm that wants to hire them and a firm that has a strategic reason to hire them. Those are very different conversations. The latter tends to produce better outcomes.

What This Means for Firms

Firms should also rethink how they approach lateral recruiting. If a firm knows it wants to build a private equity practice, it should not wait until a partner calls. If it wants to expand life sciences litigation, it should understand the entire Boston talent map. If it has a succession problem, it should identify potential future leaders before the current leader announces retirement.

And if it is consistently losing midlevel associates, the answer may not be another recruiting campaign. It may be compensation, staffing, partner behaviour, workload, or a practice that no longer offers the career path candidates want. Recruiting can identify the symptom. Market intelligence helps identify the cause.

The Jameson Legal Advantage

This is ultimately why the Boston market is so interesting right now.

The information asymmetry is enormous. Law firms know their own hiring needs. Candidates know their own frustrations and ambitions. Neither necessarily knows what is happening across the rest of the market.

A good recruiter sits in the middle of that information flow. We hear when a firm is quietly looking, and when a partner is frustrated. We know which firms are willing to stretch on compensation, which firms have real appetite for a particular practice, and which “hot” searches are actually difficult to close. And, perhaps most importantly, we know when a seemingly perfect lateral move isn’t actually a good fit. That is the difference between recruiting and search.

The Bottom Line

Boston is not simply experiencing a lateral hiring boom. It is becoming a more sophisticated lateral market.

The firms winning talent are not necessarily the firms making the most noise. They are the firms with a clear answer to the question: “Why do we need this lawyer?”

The candidates winning the best opportunities are not necessarily the ones most actively looking. They are the ones whose practice, expertise, relationships, and ambitions line up with a firm’s strategic needs.

They are connecting three things: firm strategy, attorney ambition, and market intelligence.

That is where the real Boston lateral market is in 2026.

If you’re hiring and want to make sure your firm’s US expansion strategy is built on the right talent, get in touch with Will Sciarretta to discuss how Jameson Legal can help you secure the candidates you want.