Reconceiving the Tournament of Lawyers: Tracking, Seeding, and Information Control in the Internal Labor Markets of Elite Law Firms

Changing career models and capacity for innovation in professional services

“…The up-or-out model is a form of tournament promotion system (Galanter & Palay, 1991;Gilson & Mnookin, 1985;Kordana, 1995;Landers et al, 1996;Lazear & Rosen, 1981;Wilkins & Gulati, 1998). Candidates compete against each other for promotion to a limited number of positions at the next grade, and promotion is based on relative ranking rather than any individual's absolute merits.…”

“…Wilkins & Gulati, 1998). For over a decade, professional service firms have been under pressure to become more corporate or business-like in their structures and systems-including their promotion system.…”

“…Hence, while new formal policies do away with the traditional "up-or-out" regime in theory, both career models coexist in practice. Thus, innovation in the promotion and career system has introduced important modifications to the traditional up-or-out model, but has not altogether displaced it (Malhotra et al, 2010; see also Galanter & Henderson, 2008;Wilkins & Gulati, 1998).…”

Externalities in recruiting

“…Such scrutiny in the selection of juniors can be found in industries like top management consulting and large law …rms. We would thus expect to …nd less recruitment from outside in these industries, a prediction that is supported by empirical evidence (see, e.g., Wilkins and Gulati (1998) on promotion-topartnership tournaments in large law …rms). Clearly, this prediction can be diluted if outsiders o¤er additional bene…ts such as bringing with them an important client base.…”

Learning-by-Employing: The Value of Commitment under Uncertainty

“…2 The literature on labor markets in professional service industries provides evidence that probationary appointments, usually coupled with so-called up-or-out rules, are often used and entail an explicit commitment to retain a newly hired worker for a prespecified period of time. See, for instance, Carmichael (1988), Gibbons (1998), Wilkins and Gulati (1998), Rebitzer and Taylor (2007), and Ghosh and Waldman (2010). We discuss the evidence on the use of probationary appointments in more detail in Section 6. of the consultant assigned to the project and on his effort.…”