The first thing this year’s class of new partners want you to know is they’re happy to be here. After a decade of “outwit, outbill, outlast”—as one San Francisco junior partner puts it—the title is validating on a personal level. But compared to most of their colleagues, many partners promoted between 2019 and 2022 feel more like Rodney Dangerfield: They don’t get no respect.

Too old to benefit from the unprecedented associate salary wars and too young to reap the record-breaking year-end profits of equity partners, many of today’s new partners are feeling overworked and underappreciated—not in spite of their promotions, but because of them. At firms where ever-expanding nonequity tiers funnel into one-in, one-out equity partnerships, many new partners said they ultimately traded money and time with their families for more responsibility, the least competent associates, and the internal politics of Big Law partnerships. At a time when firms desperately needed bodies, loyalty came no cheaper than in the form of retention-oriented promotions.