A new book charts Trilegal’s ascent in corporate law to show how modern law firms grow

Trilegal operates what is called a “lockstep” system for its partners; there is a lot hiding behind that term. Fundamentally, it means that partners of the firm have an ownership interest in it. To anyone unfamiliar with the legal profession in India, this might sound obvious. Well, it isn’t. Trilegal was the first to adopt it and in 2025 remains the only one of the top-tier law firms to operate this model.

Picking an ownership and compensation model that would work for us was not an obviously simple task. We would have loved to follow examples from closer to home but, in the early years of the twenty-first century, there were no natural domestic role models for us to follow. As we have seen, most of the larger firms that existed at the time were closely held, either by families or by individuals that had established them.

There were other partners in these firms beyond the “name” partners but, to the best of our knowledge, the vast majority of nonfamily partners were salaried. This meant that while they functioned as partners in many ways – they led transactions, supervised teams and perhaps even managed some client relationships – they were compensated on the basis of a salary plus a performance-linked bonus. This didn’t sit well with us, so we decided to start from scratch and see how law firms outside India worked.

The evolution of professional firms follows a pattern that is consistent across industries. What started as individual practices gradually developed into the sophisticated partnership structures we see today. Take accounting firms, for example. Price and Waterhouse were once separate family businesses before merging and evolving into a professional partnership. The same happened in consulting – McKinsey, which turns 100 next year, grew from an individual practice into the partnership model that became the gold standard for professional services.

Law firms followed a similar trajectory. Most lawyers started as sole practitioners – they would set up their practice, wait for clients to find them, and gradually build their reputation and client base. As these practices grew, the natural first step was to bring in family members. Sons (rarely daughters) would join what then became family firms. Thomson Snell & Passmore, the oldest continuously operating law firm in the world, went through three generations of Hoopers starting in 1570, followed by several generations of Scoonses.

As long as ownership stayed within the family, there wasn’t much need to worry about equity structures or profit distribution models. But eventually, these family firms would hit natural limits – descendants who were incompetent, uninterested or simply too few to sustain growth. Any firm with serious growth ambitions eventually would need to look beyond the family.

Separately, a different model evolved. Some lawyers realised that it made sense to share office space and support staff costs while maintaining financially separate practices. Many barristers’ chambers in the UK (and some Mumbai law firms still operate this way) would have individual lawyers under one roof, sharing expenses but keeping their own clients and profits.

Over time, as lawyers began specialising, it is easy to imagine these loose associations developing internal client referral arrangements and fee-sharing systems. Eventually, some of these groups would have wondered whether it made more sense to formalise everything into a single profit-sharing entity. This is where things got interesting and complicated. Eventually, these firms would have had to think about how equity would be allocated and how partners would be compensated.

The evolution of compensation models is the continuing story of law firms navigating the tension between the need for institutional cohesion and the recognition of individual achievements. We will see how this has been a key thread through Trilegal’s history as well.

To understand modern law firm partnerships, a natural place to start is the Cravath System. This framework was pioneered by the New York firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore in the early twentieth century, and it fundamentally shaped how elite law firms think about partnership.

The Cravath approach aimed at institutional excellence and was built around developing internal talent as the primary engine for growth. The firm trained junior associates rigorously and promoted only those who consistently demonstrated both high ability and alignment with the firm’s culture. Loyalty to the firm had to come before loyalty to individual ambitions or even individual clients. The most distinctive feature of this system was lockstep compensation. Here’s how it works:

The firm’s total equity is divided into points or units. Partners receive a certain number of points based primarily on their seniority (how long they’ve been a partner). These points form a ladder, say from 10 to 50 points, with the senior-most partners capped at the top. When lawyers become partners, they start at the bottom of the lockstep – in our example, at 10 points. Each year, they move up the ladder, gaining additional points according to a pre-defined scale. After 10 years, assuming they gain four points annually, they’d have 50 points and be at the top of the lockstep, at which stage their points are capped.

Additional points are ‘created’ each year, to take care of annual points increases and points allocated to new partners. Practically, this involves a sub-division of the existing equity and, in real terms, capped partners at the top of the lockstep see a reduction in the actual percentage of equity their points represent. The firm’s distributable profits are divided among all partners in proportion to their points. If the total profit pool is Rs 100 crore and all partners collectively hold 1,000 lockstep points, a partner with 50 points receives Rs 5 crore.

The system encourages loyalty because it takes years to reach the top, where the big rewards are. It promotes collaboration, since everyone shares from the same profit pool – partners are incentivised to help each other rather than compete internally. Clients tend to become clients of the firm, not just of individual partners. This aligns with the early-twentieth-century view of legal practice as a profession centred on trust and collegiality.

However, lockstep has drawbacks. Underperforming senior partners can earn substantial compensation simply due to their accumulated points, while younger, high-performing partners may feel their progression is too slow and become frustrated. It is not a system that works well for rainmakers – partners who bring in significant business and who might feel that their rewards should reflect their business origination abilities more closely.

In fact, the global financial crisis of 2008 placed significant pressure on lockstep models, as top London-based firms like Clifford Chance and Freshfields grappled with demands from rainmakers for faster rewards, leading to them ‘de-equitising’ or pushing some partners down the lockstep.

Excerpted with permission from Trilegal: The Making of a Modern Indian Law Firm, Akshay Jaitly, Juggernaut.