A Deep Dive into Law Firm Turnover at Canada's Largest Law Firms

I was certainly surprised by various aspects of the results.

As a former softball player and baseball fan, I am a bit obsessed with data. So much so that I am paying thousands of dollars a year to access databases which do deep dives into various aspects of the business of law. One of those databases is Pirical. Primarily used by recruiters, Pirical cobbles together various statistics about large law firms from publicly available sources such as law firm websites, law society directories and LinkedIn data (to name a few). The database covers multiple countries, including Canada. For some legal markets they also assemble aggregate data based on firm size to provide a convenient benchmarking tool.

The Canadian content is fascinating to me as large law firms in Canada are notoriously secretive about their affairs. There is very little publicly available information that can be used to compare the law firms. This makes it challenging for law students who are choosing a firm, associate lawyers looking to make a change and also difficult for law firms to compare how they measure up with competitors. The legal publications in the US and UK have had far greater success at getting information out of firms than their counterparts in Canada.

One area that I am interested in is law firm turnover. We all know firms who seem to churn out lawyers regularly and others who seem to attract people who never leave. It takes some time in the practice of law to identify those firms and, really, what you learn really depends on who is in your network. I recently played around with the Pirical data related to turnover and found a wide disparity between Canada’s largest law firms. I decided to dive into the issue of turnover and share my results with my Substack subscribers. Why only subscribers? Well, I am paying thousands to access these databases and would like to make some of that money back.