Associates Feel Market Swings as Partners’ Paydays Soar

Partners and associates alike are more satisfied with their jobs now than they were in 2021, but burnout and billable hour pressure remain high—especially for less-experienced legal professionals.

Meanwhile, a divide has deepened between equity and non-equity partners, with attorneys who have an ownership stake in their firms making more money than ever.

For the past five years, Bloomberg Law has been tracking key statistics like these through its annual Attorney Workload & Hours Survey. Thousands of attorneys share their thoughts each year, with the 2025 survey receiving more than 1,400 responses.

Here are four trends we’ve seen in the data that tell us about the changes shaping the legal profession.

Job satisfaction has slowly improved since 2021. In 2025, nearly 3 in 4 associates said they were somewhat satisfied or satisfied with their job. This marked an increase from 2021, when only half of associates said they were somewhat satisfied or better.

Partners saw even higher overall rates of job satisfaction, with 81% saying in 2025 they were somewhat satisfied or better. Jeffrey Lowe, a partner recruiter at CenterPeak, said that trend may be related to the “skyrocketing” partner compensation rates over the last few years.

Lateral partner movement used to be somewhat taboo, Lowe said, but firms “have now jumped in with both feet, and now it’s just a free for all.”

Although associates saw growth in job satisfaction over the last five years, they also reported more variable feelings of burnout from year to year. Associate recruiter Danielle Thompson at Damato Search Group suggested these high burnout rates may be a function of recent law school graduates realizing the legal job market is not what they expected.

“They went into this thinking this was kind of a safe bet profession, and it has been nothing like that at all since they’ve graduated,” Thompson said.

Attorneys, especially associates, consistently reported high billing hours over the last five years. Bloomberg Law found associates every year since 2021 billed more than 40 hours a week every quarter except for Q1 2025 when it dipped. Thompson said she’s seen associates increasingly looking to move to smaller firms that have lower billable hour expectations, even if it means taking a pay cut.

However, boutique firms are harder to find than associates expect, she said. “Elite boutiques in the current day tend to be high sophistication, high hours expectation, not as much work-life balance as you would think.”

Partners and associates alike were working particularly long hours in 2021. Kate Reder Sheikh, a recruiter at Major, Lindsey & Africa, said 2021 was a huge year both for mergers and acquisitions activity and for law firm moves due to the volume of work.

As the market cooled in 2023 and 2024, attorneys went back to a slightly calmer work schedule. However, the last quarter of 2025 saw attorneys working an average of 51.7 hours per week— the highest since early 2021.

According to Jeffrey Lowe, this number is likely an undercount. Some firms expect attorneys to be “on green,” or available on Teams, at nearly all hours, he said.

“They are getting the ability to be out of the office, but are they working less hard? Are they more away or are the expectations even higher?” Lowe said. “It hasn’t all been a positive for them.”

Subscribers can view the full archive of Bloomberg Law surveys here.