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The profession has spent two decades improving the pathway to partnership. The next question is whether we can expand the reform agenda to consider equality as a core principle in whatever is built next, writes Kim Wiegand.
Australia’s law firms are quietly redesigning how they are owned and governed.
Partnership models are being restructured, equity arrangements reconsidered, service companies separated from legal practices, and, in some cases, firms are preparing for new forms of capital. The operating models that will shape the profession for the next decade are being built right now.
That makes this moment unusually important. When governance and ownership structures move, they tend to set the rules of the game for a generation. Done well, they can broaden participation in ownership and influence. Done poorly, they can simply hardwire existing power structures into a new model.
At the same time, the industry is celebrating a milestone: women made up half of new partner appointments in Australia’s top law firms for the first time in 2025. Woot!
But is it real progress? If we are redesigning how value and influence are distributed in our firms, this is also the moment to ask a harder question: “How many of those partnerships actually come with equity?”
Yes, the 2025 AFR Law Partnership Survey highlighted something worth celebrating. For the first time, women made up half of all new partner appointments across Australia’s top firms.
Lander & Rogers and Addisons lead on overall female representation. Ashurst, HSF Kramer and Allens are the standouts at the top tier, each above 40 per cent. Clayton Utz appointed six women out of seven new partners. MinterEllison announced a female chairwoman at the same time it reported women at 36 per cent of its partnership.
This is progress. Real, hard-won, and worth acknowledging. But before we celebrate too loudly, read the footnote.
Of the 50-plus firms surveyed, only five had more women than men in their partnership overall. And the Best Law Firms Australia 2026 Market Report found that women hold just 31 per cent of equity partner positions, while remaining more likely than their male counterparts to hold salaried partnerships, special counsel roles and other titles that carry the name without the economics or influence.
That single omission from the headline reporting allows firms to report gender progress while the question of who actually owns the decisions goes unanswered. Surely firms that are serious about equality should welcome transparency around ownership as well.
Let’s ask this plainly: Is a salaried partner without equity a “partner” in a meaningful commercial sense? They do not share in the actual value of the firm. They do not vote on its strategic direction. They carry professional liability, manage people, serve clients and often perform at every level expected of a full equity partner, without the financial upside or governance rights that equity confers.
My question: “Is that equality, or simply the appearance of it?”
My own research, conducted in 2022 with partners across Australian firms, found that women named a lack of support from current partners as their single biggest barrier to partnership. For men, it appeared third.
Women were also four times more likely to personally invest in professional coaching in aid of partnership appointments. They typically began formal development pathways later, often at the senior associate level, while men started earlier in their careers.
In other words, many women prepare harder for a decision made by a room that has historically looked like their male colleagues, in structures not traditionally set up to support sponsorship of women.
My view of the market and trends suggests the governance window may just be open for change to those traditional structures.
Law firm governance and partnership models across Australia are in active transition. Firms are restructuring equity arrangements, separating service companies from legal practices, introducing new partner tiers to manage capital and cost structures and, in some cases, preparing for external investment.
By carrot or stick, the profession is quietly redesigning the architecture of ownership. Equity structures, governance rights, capital requirements and voting frameworks are all under review. The decisions being made today will shape who holds influence in Australian law firms not just next year, but well into the next decade.
Another shift sits quietly behind many of these structural reforms. Looking further afield to international markets, across global law firms, the proportion of partners who actually hold equity has been tightening.
Larger salaried partner ranks, smaller equity pools and more selective ownership entry are becoming common features of modern partnership models. The commercial logic is clear. A smaller equity group can strengthen financial performance, increase flexibility in remuneration and tighten control over capital.
But it also raises an important question: “If the circle of ownership is becoming smaller, how deliberately are firms thinking about who enters it next?”
If women remain concentrated in salaried or income partner tiers while the equity group makes these structural decisions, the new models being built risk simply reproducing the old inequality in a different form.
The intention may be operational efficiency. But the outcome, if it is not actively addressed, may be a narrowing of the circle in which real decisions are made, with women disproportionately outside it. Governance reform that happens without women in the room, or with women present but not at the equity table, is not neutral. It embeds structural disadvantage for years. The window to get this right is now, not once the structure has settled.
None of this suggests the partnership model needs to be dismantled – put your torches away. But as firms rethink governance and capital structures, there is an opportunity to design clearer and fairer pathways into ownership. Ones that acknowledge – and even accommodate – the often-disproportionate allocation of caring responsibilities.
Some firms are already experimenting with different approaches.
None of these ideas is radical. But they do signal something important: that ownership in the profession is evolving, not simply being inherited. If the next generation of equity partners simply looks like a younger version of the last one, structural reform will have changed very little.
The firms that think carefully about these questions now have the opportunity to build partnership models that reflect the profession they want to lead in the next decade, not simply the one they inherited from the last.
The progress in 2025 is real, and it matters. But progress measured in appointment rates, without equity, without influence and without structural reform that places women inside the governance decisions being made right now, is not the destination.
The profession has spent two decades improving the pathway to partnership. The next question is whether we can expand the reform agenda to consider equality as a core principle in whatever is built next.
Kim Wiegand is the founder of Julip Advisory.
