What happens to your practice when a senior leaves

A senior hands in their notice. In most practices, the next two weeks are spent trying to extract what they know. Which clients are mid-job. What is outstanding. What the client was told last month. What is due when.

Most of that knowledge is in their head, in their inbox, or in a spreadsheet only they maintained. The practice discovers how much it depended on one person at the exact moment that person is leaving.

This is not a loyalty problem. It is a systems problem. If the only place a client's status lives is in the memory of the person doing the work, then the practice has no record. It has a person.

The firms that handle resignations well are the ones where the work is visible by default. Every job has an owner and a stage. Every deadline is recorded against the client it belongs to. Every instruction is captured where the next person can see it. When someone leaves, the practice does not lose the knowledge because the knowledge was never only in their head.

This also makes the practice easier to run while everyone is still there. Partners stop having to ask three people what is happening. Juniors can see what is expected of them without chasing. The senior who leaves is replaced by a system that already knows what is next.

Firmhub models the practice this way. Jobs, deadlines, client structures and capacity are all visible to the people who need them. When someone resigns, you reassign the work. You do not reconstruct it.