Nothing on this page is legal advice. Restrictive covenants, notice provisions and garden leave turn on their exact wording and on the law of the relevant jurisdiction, and enforceability varies. Take independent legal advice before acting on anything set out here.
Partner economics
How consulting partnerships actually work.
Tracks, revenue credit, equity, guarantees and covenants — the mechanics nobody explains until you are already in the process.
Most of what determines the outcome of a partner move is structural: how the firm counts revenue, which track you are on, what the covenant actually restrains. Almost none of it is published anywhere. These explainers are drawn from our own conversations with Partners and Directors across the UK and DACH — anonymised throughout, and written to be useful rather than promotional.
Partner & Director levelUK · DACHUpdated as we learn
The explainers
Tracks
Is the expert track a dead end for partnership?
Why expert and specialist tracks lead to a senior title but rarely to equity — and how to tell which track you are actually on.
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Compensation
How revenue credit works — and why two identical offers are not identical
The rule that decides whose number a piece of work counts toward, and why it matters more than base salary over three years.
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Coming next
Notice, garden leave and the non-compete stack
How a notice period and a covenant combine, what they actually restrain, and where the UK and German positions differ.
Coming
Whose client is it? Portability and the black book
Firm-owned relationships versus a real following — the assumption that most often breaks a business case.
Coming
Equity, non-equity and fixed-share
What the partner title actually buys you, and the questions to ask before you accept one.
Coming
What a partner is expected to bill
Revenue expectations by level and firm type, in bands — and why year one and year two are different problems.
On sourcing. These pieces reflect recurring patterns across many conversations, not any individual firm, contract or candidate. Nothing here is attributed, and nothing identifies a current or former client. Where the mechanics edge into employment law we say so, and both sides should take their own advice.
Have a straight conversation about it
We map credit models, tracks and covenants as a matter of course when we run a search — it is the part of a move candidates most often get wrong. A conversation costs nothing, commits you to nothing, and you will leave knowing more about your market than you did.
