It is a strange feature of a partner's life that the single most valuable asset they own - their practice - is the one they have never had properly valued.
You know what you bill. You know what you collect. You may have a rough instinct, formed from rumour and the occasional indiscreet conversation, of what a competing firm might pay to acquire you. But you have almost certainly never had your practice valued the way an acquirer actually values it, because the only people who routinely quote you a number are recruiters trying to move you, and the number a recruiter quotes is a tool, not an assessment.
It is worth understanding how a practice is genuinely valued - the real analysis a sophisticated firm runs before it commits to a lateral - because once you see the mechanism, you see immediately why the recruiter's flattery number and the real number are rarely the same.
Billings are the beginning, not the answer
The first thing an experienced acquirer does with a partner's headline billing figure is take it apart.
A practice that bills five million pounds is not worth the same as another practice that bills five million pounds. The acquirer is not buying the historical number; they are buying the future revenue that will actually follow the partner across the threshold, and the gap between those two figures can be enormous. The analysis that closes the gap turns on a handful of questions, and they are the questions you should be asking about your own practice long before any firm asks them about you.
How portable is the revenue, actually? Some of what you bill is yours - it follows the relationship, and the relationship is with you. Some of it is the firm's - it follows the platform, the brand, the panel position, the institutional history, and it stays behind when you leave. The acquirer is trying to determine, with some precision, which is which. A partner who has confused platform revenue for personal revenue is a partner who will arrive at a new firm and underperform their own projections - the most common way a lateral move disappoints both sides. The portable figure, not the billing figure, is the foundation of the valuation.
How concentrated is the book? A practice built on three institutional clients is valued very differently from a practice built on thirty. Concentration is both strength and risk - it signals deep relationships, but it also means the loss of a single client materially changes the picture. The acquirer prices the concentration carefully, and the partner who understands their own concentration profile negotiates from a far stronger position than the partner who has never examined it.
What does the revenue cost to produce? A practice that generates through the leverage of a well-built team is worth more than a practice of equivalent billings that depends entirely on the partner's own hours, because the first is scalable and durable and the second is capped and fragile. The team economics - who comes, what they cost, what they generate - are part of the valuation, which is precisely why a team move is a different and more valuable transaction than an individual one.
How well does it fit the platform? The same practice is worth different amounts to different firms. A practice fills a strategic gap at one firm and merely duplicates existing capability at another. The acquirer who needs exactly what you have will pay materially more than the acquirer who merely would not mind having it. This is why the question is never simply "what is my practice worth" but "what is my practice worth, and to whom" - and why testing a single firm tells you almost nothing about your actual value.
Why the recruiter's number misleads you
Set against this analysis, the number a recruiter quotes to get you on the phone is revealed for what it is. It is not the output of a valuation. It is an opening designed to generate interest - high enough to make you lean in, vague enough to commit to nothing, and untethered to any specific platform's actual willingness to pay.
The recruiter has not analysed your portability, because they have not seen your book. They have not assessed your concentration, your team economics, or your platform fit against a specific acquirer, because they are not representing a specific acquirer's considered interest - they are casting for a candidate to fit a role. The number is a lure, and an experienced partner knows it is a lure, which is part of why so many partners discount the entire conversation and stay where they are. They have correctly identified that the number is not real. They have simply concluded, wrongly, that because the recruiter's number is not real, no real number is available to them.
The number exists. It is simply hard to find alone.
There is a real number - the figure a specific platform that genuinely needs your practice would pay to acquire it, established through proper analysis and tested against that platform's actual willingness rather than a recruiter's speculation. But finding it requires exactly the things a partner acting alone does not have.
It requires the analysis - a genuine valuation of your practice along all the dimensions above, conducted by someone who understands how acquirers think, before any approach is made. It requires knowing which platforms have the specific gap your practice fills, because the real number only emerges from the firm that needs you most, not the firms that would merely accept you. And it requires testing the market in a way that produces a real figure rather than a flattering one - which means approaching from a position of representation and leverage, not from the exposed position of a partner making enquiries about himself.
This is the work. A practice valued properly, the right platforms identified, the market tested against them with your interests held and your name protected - so that the number you finally see is not a lure designed to move you, but the genuine measure of what you have built.
You have spent years assuming the recruiter's number was the only number on offer, and being right to distrust it.
The real one is worth knowing.