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Merger coverage is written almost entirely from one point of view: which partners are leaving, which firm they're headed to, and how much business is expected to follow them. What's almost never covered is what happens to the associates who staffed those partners' matters and didn't get an invitation to come along. How often does a genuine team departure actually happen?
How Common Is a "True" Team Lift-Out?
BlackByrd Partners' analysis of the corporate lateral market, tracking 2,763 attorney moves from Q2 2025 through Q2 2026, identified 369 "group move events"—defined as two or more attorneys landing at the same firm on the same date. That sounds like a lot of coordinated team departures, but it mostly isn't. These events "are rarely coordinated departures from one firm—they reflect firms making multiple individual hires in a single month, often drawing from different source firms." Simpson Thacher's largest single-month intake in the dataset, for instance, brought in 24 attorneys—but they arrived from six different firms, not one.
A handful of departures from your practice group landing at the same competitor over a few weeks can look, from the inside, like a single coordinated exit. The data suggests it's more often multiple people independently reaching the same conclusion about the same competitor's opportunity, which is very different from one instigator recruiting a whole team as a unit.
When It's Real
That said, real, coordinated departures do happen, and when they do, the disruption for the associates left behind is substantial. The clearest analogy to the situation, while not exactly the same thing, is law firm mergers. JDJournal describes the associate experience there as follows: "the transition period can be disruptive. Associates might face uncertainty about reporting lines, compensation structures, and firm culture."
While mergers aren't the same as team departures, what's being described isn't really about mergers as such—it's about what happens to associates any time the structure above them shifts suddenly, through a decision they didn't make. Whether the trigger is a merger integration or a practice group leaving for a competitor, the associate-level experience is the same: reporting lines become unclear, the future of compensation and case staffing is genuinely uncertain, and often, nobody explains any of it to the most affected people, at least not right away.
The Retention Backdrop Adds Risk
This kind of disruption isn't happening in a stable environment. According to NALP Foundation data reported by The National Law Review, 83% of associates who departed their firms in 2025 did so within five years of hire—a record, up from 80% the year before. The piece notes this isn't a single-year anomaly but a trend that's moved in one direction since 2022: the retention window firms have traditionally counted on, roughly five years to develop an associate before they become a lateral risk, now looks closer to three or four years.
An associate in the aftermath of a team departure—reduced staffing certainty, an unclear reporting structure, questions about whether the group will be rebuilt—is dealing with that disruption inside a retention window that was already compressed. The margin for the firm to lose that associate's patience is smaller than it would have been a few years ago, and, realistically, the associate's own patience for uncertainty is probably smaller too.
What Associates Left Behind Should Do
First, assess whether leadership is actively backfilling the group with new hires—a sign of real institutional commitment to the practice—or quietly absorbing the loss without replacing it. That's often visible well before anyone says so directly, just by watching whether recruiting activity for the group picks up.
It's also worth tracking your own billable hour trend directly. The same National Law Review piece makes a broader point about leverage that applies: the more specifically an associate can articulate their own practice experience—not just "I do litigation" but what kind of matters, at what stage, with what level of real ownership—the stronger their position if they do decide to test the market. That specificity matters most exactly when a group's stability is in question, since a vague, generic profile is the hardest one to place quickly.
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