Your Firm Says It Is Returning to Merit. The Question Nobody Asks Is: Returning From Where?
Lately, I keep hearing law firms talk about “returning to merit.”
It is meant to sound principled, even a little nostalgic. Back to basics. May the best lawyer win. And every time I hear it, the same question comes up, and it’s one nobody at the podium seems eager to take.
Returning from where exactly?
Because in more than two decades in BigLaw, I never once saw a firm where “merit” was the thing that decided who advanced. Merit was the entry fee. It got you in the building. What happened after that ran on something else entirely, and pretending otherwise is how a lot of genuinely excellent lawyers waste years they do not get back.
Merit Is the Entry Fee
A quick note on the word, because I am using it loosely and on purpose. When firms say merit, they mean what they can measure. Grades. Class rank. The quality of the work. Hours. I will use it that way too, because that is how the game is actually scored. But hold the word skeptically while you read, because even that version was never the neutral yardstick it is sold as. The scores and the polish track, heavily, with who had the tutoring, the stable home, the parent who could explain what a deposition was. Nobody arrives at the starting line from the same place.
With that said, here is where people get stuck.
Merit is necessary. You cannot skip it. The work has to be excellent, the judgment has to be sound, the clients have to be served. None of what follows works without it.
But necessary is not the same as sufficient. Walk through any firm and look honestly at who advanced, and you will find that the deciding factors were never on the evaluation form. Access, meaning who you were close enough to learn from and be staffed by. Visibility, meaning whether the people who matter could see your value or only your hours. Credit, meaning whether your wins stayed attached to your name or quietly dissolved into someone else’s. Sponsorship, meaning whether anyone with real standing said your name in the rooms you were not in.
Those four – access, visibility, credit, and sponsorship – are what actually move careers in BigLaw. Merit gets you to the starting line. It does not run the race for you. And if you did not know that, you were not naive. You were just never let in on it.
"Returning to Merit" Usually Means Returning to Default
So when a firm announces it is returning to merit, especially under pressure, it is worth asking what it is actually returning to.
Most of the time, it is not returning to merit. It is returning to default.
And default has never been neutral. Default is memory-based and comfort-based. It favors whoever is already in the room, already known, already top of mind when a good matter comes in and someone has to be staffed before lunch. Default is simply what happens when no one is being deliberate. And “no one is being deliberate” has never once been good news for the person who was not already on the inside.
This is the part worth slowing down on, because the two words get used as though they were synonyms when they are closer to opposites. Merit was never neutral either, for all the reasons we just covered. But default does not even pretend. Merit at least points at the work. Default just reaches for the familiar. Calling the second thing the first does not make it true. It only makes it harder to argue with.
Why Misreading This Costs You Years
Here is the expensive mistake, and I have watched capable people make it for a decade at a stretch.
You read all of this as a fairness problem. The system is unfair, you can see plainly that it is unfair, and so you set out to defeat the unfairness the only way that feels available and honorable. By becoming undeniable. You work harder. You make the work flawless. You wait for your excellence to grow so obvious that it cannot possibly be overlooked.
But excellence was the entry fee, and you already paid it. Paying it again, and again, and again, does not buy the thing you are actually after, because that thing was never for sale at that particular counter. You are trying to win a fairness argument the system is not even having, while the people advancing past you are quietly working a different problem altogether.
It is not a fairness problem. It is a leverage problem. And the two call for opposite strategies. A fairness problem says prove you deserve it. A leverage problem says position your value where the people who decide can see it and act on it. You can spend twenty years on the first one and lose. You can start changing the second one this quarter.
The Better Question
So the question to carry out of this is not the one you have probably been asking yourself at 11pm.
The question is not “Am I good enough?” You have answered that one. You answer it every day, in your billables and your reviews and the work you turn around at hours no sensible person should be awake for.
And if you came up without the cushion many of your peers had, you answered it from further back, carrying more. You did not pass the same test they passed. You passed a harder one. So when I say the entry fee is already paid, I mean that more emphatically for you, not less. The question of whether you are good enough is not just answered. It is overanswered.
The real question is: where is my value visible to the people who decide what happens next?
That is not a smaller question. It is a harder one, because it asks you to stop spending energy on the part you cannot control, whether the system is fair, and start spending it on the part you can, which is where and to whom your value is legible. That redirection, from proving to positioning, is most of the work. It is also, not by accident, where your energy comes back. Arguing with a system that is not listening is the most exhausting job in the building, and you are hereby given permission to resign from it today.
Where This Leaves You
If you are a lawyer or an underrepresented professional reading this, the relief is in the reattribution. You are not failing a fairness test. You passed it a long time ago. The work in front of you is not more proof of merit. It is leverage. Pick one of the four you are weakest on (access, visibility, credit, or sponsorship) and give it the next quarter. Notice how different that feels from spending another quarter trying to be marginally more excellent than you already are.
If you lead a firm, a word about the slogan. If “returning to merit” turns out to mean returning to default, it will quietly cost you the people you can least afford to lose, and the language will let you call that merit while it happens. Default favors whoever is already in the room, which means it systematically underuses the talent you spent the most to recruit. If you actually want merit to drive outcomes, you have to do the deliberate work that default skips. Make the real criteria legible. Attach credit accurately. Build access on purpose. Merit does not maintain itself. Left alone, it decays into default, and default always has a label for the people it passes over. It calls them “not ready.” It calls them “unqualified,” “unmotivated,” or “not partner material.” It calls them “lazy,” even when they have outworked everyone in the building. Every one of those labels puts the failure on the person, and never comes close to the only accurate label, which is “overlooked.”
Your firm may or may not be returning to merit. You do not have to wait to find out. You can stop paying an entry fee you already paid, and start building the leverage that actually decides what happens next.
For individuals ready to apply the framework, DM me “SRA” on LinkedIn.
This is not resignation. This is liberation. And it is strategy.
