Season Two · Part One · Episode 7 of 24
The compensation formula turns out to be the argument, all along.
The quarterly compensation committee met on a Wednesday, in a conference room with a view that nobody in it had looked at in years.
Tom Reyes chaired it the way he’d chaired it for eleven years, and the agenda was the same as always: partner distributions, origination credit reconciliation, and a handful of adjustments for anyone who’d taken on new leadership roles that quarter. Jason sat midway down the table, Hal on his left. Renee sat across from them, a legal pad in front of her that Jason noticed, without remarking on it, was already half full.
The finance director, a careful woman named Priya who had run this same report for six years, pulled up the origination reconciliation first, as it always came first. Line by line, partner by partner, the annual credit for every client relationship the firm billed against.
She reached Marcus Webb’s line and paused, the way you pause at a name you’ve been told not to make a big deal of.
“Zeroed out, obviously,” Priya said. “Going forward, whatever’s left of the book gets reallocated to whoever’s actually doing the work. If nobody’s been formally assigned credit, it defaults to firm origination, which, for compensation purposes, means it doesn’t count toward anyone.”
◆
“Walk me through that again,” Jason said. “If nobody’s been formally assigned credit.” He knew the rule existed. He had sat through years of these reconciliations. He had simply never once heard anyone, himself included, say the arithmetic of it out loud.
Priya nodded, already used to partners needing this explained more than once, since almost nobody who benefited from the formula had ever had a reason to study it closely. “Origination credit follows the partner who originated the relationship indefinitely unless it’s formally reassigned in the compensation system. If a partner brings someone else in and wants to share the credit going forward, they can request it. It’s rare.”
“How rare,” Renee asked, though from the way she asked, Jason suspected she already knew.
Priya checked. “Four requests over six years. Firmwide.”
“And if I did request it,” Jason said slowly, thinking, without wanting to, of twenty-two rows and a column that was almost entirely blank, “say I brought an associate onto Whitlock, and a few years from now I wanted them to carry real credit for it. What happens to my number?”
“It goes down,” Priya said. “Permanently. Whatever percentage you assign them, you lose it, and you don’t get it back if the arrangement doesn’t work out. The formula doesn’t have a mechanism for shared credit that isn’t also reduced.”
◆
The room was quiet in a way Jason recognized, because he had sat in that same quiet three weeks earlier, alone, with a spreadsheet he hadn’t shown anyone. This was the same silence, but with witnesses.
He thought about Marcus’s toast. Never asked anyone to hand him anything. He thought about his own twenty-two rows. He understood, with an unpleasant clarity, that he had never once formally considered sharing credit on any of them, not because it hadn’t occurred to him, but because a quiet, entirely rational part of him had always known exactly what it would cost, down to the percentage point, and had simply never let the thought finish.
It wasn’t a mystery why nobody transferred relationships at MSL. The firm had built a formula that charged partners, out of their own compensation, for doing the one thing the firm needed most.
◆
Hal spoke for the first time since the meeting began. “Maybe that’s exactly why nobody does it,” he said quietly, and something in his voice made Renee look up from her legal pad.
It wasn’t an apology. Jason didn’t expect one, not from Hal, not yet. But it was the first time in this room, in all the years Jason had sat on this committee, that Hal Smith had said out loud that the old rules might have a design flaw rather than a discipline problem among the people trying to follow them.
“We reward the origination,” Renee said into the quiet Hal had left open. “We’ve never once rewarded the transfer. We built a formula that pays partners to hold on, and then we stand up at a party and call it loyalty.”
Nobody argued with her. That, more than anything said out loud that afternoon, was what Jason kept turning over on the walk back to his office. Not the formula itself. The fact that once someone finally described it plainly, in a room full of people whose compensation depended on it, not a single person in that room defended it.
◆
He didn’t raise his hand to volunteer a fix. He didn’t yet know what a fix looked like, and he’d learned enough in the last three weeks not to trust the first answer that came to him. But as he walked back down the hallway past the framed photo of Marcus that still hadn’t found a wall, Jason found himself, for the first time since the toast, thinking about who else in this building had once looked at a problem like this and known exactly how to make it visible.
← Episode 6The MSL SagaEpisode 8 →
Susan B. Silverman works with mid-sized law firm leaders on the problems this season dramatizes: succession, sponsorship, and the client relationships that never get handed down. Book a free consultation.
The MSL Saga™, MLARD™, and the 85/15 Model™ are trademarks of Susan B. Silverman Consulting. The MSL Saga and all episodes © 2026 Susan B. Silverman Consulting. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution is prohibited.
