Employee mobility networks and status transfer in U.S big law

Firms in organizational fields frequently hire and lose employees to competing firms. What is the impact of employee mobility on the status of organizations within a field? Unfortunately, empirical evidence is lacking about how hiring professionals from high or low-status actors, especially status that is obtained through third-party evaluation, impact the focal firm’s status. This research examines employee mobility across the largest law firms in the United States from 2010 to 2016 and employs fixed effects modeling to estimate associations among the status of firms from which partners were hired, network centrality, and the organizational status of hiring firms. Results showed that firms’ status increased when they hired, on average, from high-status firms, and that this association was stronger amongst more centrally located firms. Namely, we found that although the impact of sending firms’ status has a significant impact on the focal firms’ status, such an effect depends on network centrality of the sending firm. These results support the notion of status portability as well as the importance of the firm’s network position for status enhancement.

Professional flows: Lateral moves of law firm partners in Hong Kong, 1994–2018

This article uses the case of law firms in Hong Kong to develop a processual approach for understanding lateral mobility in professional service firms. Based on the analysis of 1,461 lateral moves of law firm partners reported in 300 monthly issues of the official journal of the Law Society of Hong Kong during 1994–2018, as well as archival data and interviews conducted in Hong Kong, the article offers both a bird’s-eye view of the lateral mobility of partners across law firms of different jurisdictional origins and an in-depth investigation of how elite law firms in this market, namely the Magic Circle and Wall Street firms, are influenced by the dynamics of professional flows. Theoretically, the article reconceptualizes professional service firms as organizations connected by and transform through the flows of professionals between them, a dynamic process characterized by three key concepts: waves, cycles, and turning points. In addition to its theoretical contribution, the study has broader implications for understanding Hong Kong’s economic transformation since the 1990s, particularly after Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997 and the global financial crisis in 2008.