When “Great” Lateral Hires Underperform: How AI-Driven Integration Can Finally Change the Story

Every firm has a version of this story: a star lateral arrives with strong credentials and a healthy book, receives a warm welcome, and has all the right conversations with colleagues and clients for a few months—only for momentum to stall, relationships to drift, and expectations to quietly ratchet down. Across the industry, studies now suggest that roughly half to 60% of lateral partner hires ultimately underperform or leave within five years, even as firms rely on laterals for a growing share of their revenue growth.​​

If that feels unsustainable inside your firm, it is.

The hidden cost of “normal” lateral attrition

The true cost of a failed lateral hire goes far beyond the recruiting invoice. By the time a lateral leaves, many firms have absorbed lost opportunity, integration write-offs, internal distraction, and in some cases client skepticism about the firm’s strategy. Some analyses place the hard-dollar impact of a failed partner at two to four times first-year compensation, with seven-figure losses not uncommon in Am Law firms.​

In that light, “we expect a certain failure rate” is less a strategy than an acceptance of structural value leakage.

Where integration actually breaks down

When firm leaders talk about lateral integration, familiar patterns emerge.

• Integration is front‑loaded: there is usually a strong showing around day one—office tours, welcome emails, town halls and initial introductions—but support drops sharply after 60–90 days.

• Laterals are still learning systems, navigating culture, and rebuilding a practice on a new platform at precisely the moment the firm's attention returns to other priorities.

• Few firms define what "success" should look like at 90 days, 6 months, 12 months and beyond for each lateral, or who owns which pieces of that journey.

Without shared metrics and accountability, integration remains a story told anecdotally rather than a process that can be managed, measured and improved.

10 questions to stress‑test your current approach

1. Before making an offer, have you documented what success looks like for this specific lateral at 12 and 24 months, in terms of revenue, client transitions and internal leadership?

2. Do you have a written integration plan, owned by someone, that extends for at least 12–18 months beyond the start date?

3. Can you point to 3–5 clear metrics you review regularly for each lateral (for example, new clients/matters opened, billable hours, cross-practice matters, pitches, and internal introductions completed)?

4. Is it obvious who is accountable for acting when those metrics signal that a lateral is stalling?

5. Do laterals receive structured support to rebuild their business on your platform—business development planning, client-transition strategies, and targeted internal introductions—beyond the first 90 days?

6. How consistently do practice groups and offices follow the same integration process, and where are outcomes still dependent on individual personalities?

7. Are you capturing and re-using what has worked in past "great" integrations so that success becomes a repeatable pattern instead of a happy accident?

8. Do you have a single, up-to-date view of each lateral's progress, or are you piecing together stories from email, spreadsheets and hallway conversations?

9. How are laterals themselves describing their experience at 6 and 12 months—both in formal feedback and in candid conversations?

10. Finally, if you had to defend your lateral integration strategy to your management committee as a seven-figure annual investment, what evidence would you put in the deck?

For most firms, these questions surface a mix of strengths, inconsistencies and

blind spots.

A simple five-phase framework

One way to organize the answers is around a straightforward, five-phase framework for lateral integration.

Phase 1: Define Goals

Clarify why you are hiring laterals, which client and practice objectives matter most, and how you will measure success for each hire (retention, engagement, client growth, cross-selling, cultural fit).

Phase 2: Understand Current State

Review how integration is currently happening across offices and practices, identifying what is working, where laterals are getting stuck, and where responsibilities are unclear.

Phase 3: Document What Works

Capture practical lessons from your best past integrations: sponsor behaviors, onboarding activities, BD support models, communication approaches and client-transition tactics that genuinely moved the needle.

Phase 4: Design Your Scalable Framework

Turn those lessons into a consistent process with defined roles, templates, checklists and decision points that can flex for single partners, groups or combinations.

Phase 5: Launch and Optimize

Pilot the refined framework with upcoming hires, review agreed-upon metrics at regular intervals, and use feedback from laterals, leaders and clients to make ongoing improvements.

Where AI can quietly help

Most firms are already swimming in data about laterals: time entries, pipeline activity, CRM records, new matter reports, and more. The challenge is that this information is rarely organized around a living integration plan that makes it obvious when a lateral is veering off track.​​

Custom AI-enabled dashboards allow firms connect quickly connect those dots. Dashboards can pull from the firm’s systems to highlight, for example, whether key internal introductions have happened, whether cross-selling conversations are translating into new matters, or whether the lateral’s promised book is actually moving over on the expected timeline. Leaders can see red flags in real time and adjust resources or strategy before a lateral relationship becomes unsalvageable.​​

Another barrier to effective integration is capacity: even when marketing, BD, or talent teams know what should be done, they simply do not have the bandwidth to deliver a high-touch experience to every lateral over an 18–24-month arc. This is where your AI tools are designed to shoulder the routine work so humans can focus on judgment, relationships, and problem-solving.​​

AI-generated 90-day and long-range integration plans can suggest tailored activities aligned with the firm’s priorities and the lateral’s practice, from targeted client outreach to internal collaboration opportunities, drawing on existing firm data and playbooks. A lateral communications agent can rapidly produce on-brand materials—bios, announcements, client alerts, and cross-practice pieces—freeing marketers to focus on positioning and strategy rather than starting from a blank page.​

Why this matters now

Laterals remain central to growth strategies across both Am Law and midsize firms, but the competition for talent and the cost of getting it wrong are both increasing. At the same time, legal marketers and talent leaders are being asked to do more with less, while navigating both AI adoption and evolving expectations from lateral cohorts.​​

An AI-enabled integration framework offers an alternative to choosing between white-glove support for a few key laterals and basic onboarding for everyone else. It gives CMOs, chiefs of talent, and growth leaders a structured way to reduce the failure rate, protect the firm’s investment, and deliver a more human, supported experience for the lawyers whose careers—and client relationships—are on the line.​​

If your firm is serious about making every lateral count, the question is no longer whether you can afford to invest in integration, but whether you can afford not to rethink how you are doing it.

Coterie Strategies and By Aries have been collaborating with firms to apply this five-phase approach, supported by custom AI tools such as integration dashboards, AI-assisted 90-day (and beyond) plans and lateral communications support. Whether you build a similar framework internally or partner with external advisors, the goal is the same: move lateral integration from intuition and anecdotes to a disciplined, measurable capability that matches the stakes.

If you’re curious how a five-phase, AI-supported framework might look in your environment, please reach out to Elizabeth Brick, Owner, Coterie Strategies.