Hoarding work, chasing quick wins and pitching solo
A top lawyer has likened the internal politics of some City law firms to “something resembling the Hunger Games”, warning that an obsession with partner profits is undermining collaboration and long term success.
Jonathan Peddie — a barrister who served as deputy GC at Clifford Chance before moving in-house at Barclays, and more recently a partner at Baker McKenzie — set out his warning in a lengthy article posted to LinkedIn this week. Titled The PEP trap — the evolving law firm time bomb, the piece was published shortly after he left the firm.
Peddie says the profit per equity partner-focused model “kills repeat instruction” by fostering “in-firm competition, where everyone chases their own work rather than collaborating”, eroding trust and fuelling internal rivalries.
“The model moves from thriving big firm to something resembling the Hunger Games,” he writes.
According to Peddie, this competitive scramble encourages lawyers to hoard matters, prioritise short-term individual profit and pitch for everything themselves, even outside their areas of specialism. The result, he argues, is a firm that looks to clients “like a lot of individual initiatives” rather than a coherent, collaborative outfit.
The Legal Cheek Firms Most List shows that PEP at elite US firms in the City can reach four, five, or even six million in some cases. It’s worth noting that PEP reflects the average partner earnings at a given firm, meaning many top lawyers take home significantly more.
Elsewhere in the article, Peddie criticises a culture in which some law firm partners see vital business functions as “dispensable” — assuming that lawyers can perform them “off the side of their desks” or, more honestly, “they can just be left not done, thereby ‘preserving profit’”. Functions like finance, marketing, HR, risk and compliance, he says, are often run “leaner than sensible” in the pursuit of short-term savings.
He warns that this narrow profit fixation distances the business from clients, weakens long-term market reputation, and undermines the values firms claim to uphold, including diversity and inclusion.
Peddie, who is taking a break from law to “reset and focus on family life”, concludes that a law firm’s fixation with annual partner profit distribution is “not a long-term business-health indicator” and risks building “a different law firm without realising it”.
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