The true cost of replacing a partner or specialty hire
Lateral guarantee, book-of-business transition risk, recruitment fee, onboarding ramp: the costs that the generic "200% of salary" benchmark obscures. With an honest comparison to a quiet retention play.
No signup. Numbers are conservative; sources are linked inline.
Two questions about the role
Estimated all-in replacement cost $0
A single departure. Doesn't include hard-to-quantify costs (firm culture, junior-talent retention impact, client perception of stability).
Sources: SHRM replacement-cost benchmarks (general); American Lawyer lateral-partner reporting (legal); BLS OES wage data (specialty engineering); industry-published lateral-guarantee patterns. Coefficients are conservative; specifics adjustable in the model.
The standard SHRM 150-200% benchmark covers an "average" salaried role. Partner-level and specialty-talent roles have multipliers the average doesn't capture:
- Lateral guarantees are a partnership-specific cost (paying a replacement comp before they originate revenue).
- Book-of-business risk is partnership-specific (clients who follow the departing partner, or whose work transitions away).
- Recruitment economics are sharper at senior level (retained search at 25-33% of first-year comp).
- Onboarding ramp is longer for senior roles (12-18 months, not 90 days).
Stacked, these costs often run to several times annual comp for an established partner, depending on role and tenure; substantially more than the generic benchmark. The number above is what the math actually looks like when you stop using the generic benchmark.
For context: what a quiet retention play costs
Averyn made available to the partner cohort at preferred rates, with the firm funding none of the launch:
A single avoided departure across the partner cohort is worth many years of a voluntary listing for that cohort. The retention math doesn't require the firm to fund the launches; it asks the firm to make the resource visible.
What changes for the partner: the household administrative load (the records, the portals, the providers, the family alignment) gets handled by a Care Continuity Partner. The Sunday-night dread fades. The "I might need to step back" conversation doesn't get triggered by an operational pinch point. The decision to stay full-time gets made on the merits of the work, not on caregiving capacity.
What changes for the firm: the retention math you didn't have a tool for finally has a structural answer. The cohort that's most expensive to lose has a quiet, discretion-forward option they can actually use.
This is the math behind the partner-amenity page.
The partner-cohort page, "a quiet partner-amenity benefit", is written for the cohort directly: discretion-forward, dual-identity-aware, and structured so the firm's procurement decision and an individual partner's activation decision are independent of each other.
See the partner-amenity page → · Read the senior-talent funding analysis →
Honest caveats on the model
- This estimates one departure. Multiple-departure scenarios (e.g., partner leaves and takes a junior associate with them) compound the number considerably; that compounding isn't modeled here.
- Book-of-business risk varies dramatically by practice area. Transactional partners typically have higher portability than litigation partners; the model uses a middle assumption.
- Lateral guarantee patterns are firm-specific. Some firms decline to pay any guarantee; others guarantee multi-year. The model uses a conservative single-year-50%-of-comp default.
- This says nothing about whether Averyn would actually prevent a given departure. The retention math is real, but caregiving is one of several factors that drive senior departures. Averyn addresses caregiving-driven attrition specifically; other drivers need other tools.
Use this for committee-anchoring conversations, not as the ROI model in your benefits-committee deck.
Walk through what a partner-amenity rollout looks like
A 30-min conversation covers what the listing mechanics look like, what the firm sees (aggregate counts; never names or cases), and the discretion architecture that makes the voluntary structure work for this cohort.