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Written by Steven Ongenaet, VP of Client Services & EMEA Managing Director at Nexl
On October 28, Weil, Gotshal & Manges announced that its management committee had recommended an orderly wind-down of the firm, subject to a partnership vote. Weil ranked 29th in the 2026 Am Law 100 and made over $2bn in revenue in 2025.
Multiple sources told the Wall Street Journal that the firm had no debt and few liabilities. A Weil partner anonymously shared that the firm was on pace for another strong year in 2026, with profits per equity partner possibly exceeding $6m. The announcement has led the legal market to question how exposed other firms are.
The reported sequence preceding Weil’s closure was short. Bloomberg Law reported that a group of private equity partners left for Paul Weiss and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett this summer. Then in September, corporate department leader Michael Aiello announced that he would join Cravath, Swaine & Moore, along with a group of M&A partners. Aiello and his team had been responsible for between $100m-$150m of revenue a year, roughly 5-7% of the firm's total.
In late October, merger talks with Willkie Farr & Gallagher were called off, and Ramona Nee, who was slated to take over from Barry Wolf as executive partner in January, decided against taking the role.
Kent Zimmermann, a consultant to law firm leaders at the Zeughauser Group, said in Bloomberg Law's coverage that “even very successful firms get into trouble if they cannot inspire enough confidence among their partners.”
No single cause explains an event of this size, but one thread reflects a situation we see often in our work with law firms: the risk of a small group of senior stakeholders owning firm relationships.
Rainmaker dependence is a structural risk
The way law firms are funded helps explain how quickly this played out. In his analysis of Weil’s wind-down, legal strategy consultant Jaap Bosman points out that a law firm pays its profit out to partners in full each year, so there is no capital cushion to absorb a shock.
Firms rarely publish how revenue is spread across their partners, so we can’t say how concentrated Weil’s client relationships were. However, the reporting does show how much revenue can follow a single partner, and our research suggests that kind of concentration is common across the market.
Our 2025 Rethinking Rainmakers benchmark study, produced with Camojee, surveyed 235 business development leaders across 202 professional services firms. Only 6-10% of those firms operate with systematic business development processes, where client relationships and new work are shared across the firm. Those firms also grow revenue 42% faster than their most rainmaker-dependent peers.
Client churn speaks most directly to the impact of partner departures. The least rainmaker dependent firms see 60% lower client churn than those with high rainmaker dependence. Their clients also use more of the firm’s services, delivering 3.33 services per client, compared with 1.25.
In our experience, firms with systematic BD regularly foster client relationships across their team, giving clients more reason to stay when a partner leaves. Weil’s reported results for 2026 are a reminder that strong financial performance doesn’t always reflect a firm’s exposure to a handful of departures.
Every partner needs to be able to do business & client development
In our whitepaper on AI and law firm growth, we argue that AI is freeing up more lawyer capacity than firms can fill, and that firms will need additional work to fill existing rosters. As AI adoption becomes standard, competition for work will center on the hardest-to-automate asset: client relationships. BTI Consulting's 2025 research found that 86% of law firm and client relationships started with an unprompted peer-to-peer recommendation.
Read alongside the Weil coverage, this points to a growing risk for firms. If more new work comes through relationships, firms whose relationships are concentrated among a small group of partners are much more exposed when partners leave. That’s why we believe firms need to be investing in their client relationships and process surrounding them, especially as AI changes how firms operate.
If client relationships are the asset, the firm needs to know where they sit. 42% of firms lack access to quality data for business development, and 41% do not use core technology like a CRM. For these firms, the first sign that a client relationship is siloed may be following a partner’s resignation.
A firm that expects every partner to contribute needs a system that fits into the working day. Nexl captures email and calendar activity automatically, so lawyers enter no data, and it surfaces relationship insights and nudges that tell a lawyer who to contact and why. This allows partners to keep doing their work, while the firm builds a shared record of its relationships.
Lateral integration decides whether a hire pays back
The Global Legal Post headlined its Weil coverage “Live by the lateral, die by the lateral”, and the phrase applies in both directions. Throughout 2026, Weil had been adding partners to its German offices, with eleven partner hires since the end of 2025. At the same time, Aiello and other partners were joining rival firms. Those firms now face the same question as Weil, which is whether the relationships each partner brings will become the firm’s.
Our research suggests that most firms can’t answer that question. 85% of firms do not track lateral hire success, and among those that do, the average success rate is 52%. In our experience, that gap comes down to integration. A firm with systematic BD habits has the infrastructure to bring a new partner’s clients into the wider firm, while those that rely on a few rainmakers tend to leave laterals to work their own book.
A lateral whose relationships stay in their own inbox remains free to take them to the next firm. Any firm can estimate their exposure by asking how much of their revenue rests on the relationships of a small number of people, including the partners it hired in the last few years.
Succession and exit planning for client relationships
Weil's own leadership succession shows how quickly a plan can fall apart.
In our experience, leadership succession receives more attention in a partnership than succession for client relationships. A firm should know which significant clients depend on a single partner, who else holds a relationship at each of them, and how deep those relationships run. With that map in place, a retirement, lateral move, or sudden departure becomes a transition the firm has already planned for.
A relationship map turns that kind of surprise into a managed event. For each significant client it records who holds the relationship, who else in the firm knows the client, how recently each of them has been in contact, and which services the client uses. Because the map is built from email and calendar activity, it updates as lawyers work. That view lets managing partners begin handovers while the departing partner still has a stake in a good outcome.
Why firms should act now
Weil's management committee recommended the wind-down within two months of Aiello's September announcement. A firm is unlikely to build relationship coverage in that window, so the work has to be in place before a departure is announced.
The cost of waiting also compounds. Our research projects that a firm with $300m revenue and minimal rainmaker dependency will grow to $541m over five years, compared to $458m revenue for a rainmaker-dependent peer. That’s an $83m gap, and it widens every year that a firm remains dependent on rainmakers. AI adds to the urgency. AI tooling for the practice of law is creating capacity faster than firms can fill it. This will increase competition for work, and client relationships will be key to who wins.
Prioritizing this across the whole firm calls for shared ownership of client relationships, accountability that reaches every partner, and measurement of pipeline, client churn, and lateral hire success.
What managing partners can do
Start by identifying clients that operate with a single partner relationship. From there, review how recent laterals have been integrated and what the firm measures about their results, and set a schedule for relationship handovers to start ahead of any retirement conversation. Each step depends on firmwide visibility into relationships, which is the purpose of a CRM built for law firms.
Make accountability firmwide as well, by reviewing whether compensation and recognition rewards desired behaviors, and giving partners a way to contribute to BD without changing how they work.
To see how Nexl helps partners do more business development, or how firms manage lateral hire integration using Nexl, watch our on-demand demos below:
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