There’s a right time to take on the LPQ — and there are a couple of things you should raise well before you ever open the document. Get the sequence wrong and you either burn weeks on a process that was never going to work, or you tank a good opportunity by surfacing a problem too late.

So let me walk through the timing in three parts: when to invest the effort, what to flag before you do, and the one topic many partners raise too early or too late.

Start with the effort itself. Filling out an LPQ properly is a real lift — it is not an afternoon’s work. So you don’t take it on the moment a firm shows interest. You want a conversation or two behind you first — enough to know there’s genuine mutual interest that justifies the investment.

But the flip side matters just as much: you don’t want to sink hours into it only to hit a wall that was visible from the start. So before you invest in the document, surface the handful of things that could end the conversation.

And there are two in particular worth putting on the table early — because if they’re going to be problems, you both want to know now, not later.

The first is conflicts. If one client makes up, say, seventy percent of your book, that concentration is worth raising up front — because if that client conflicts out at the new firm, the entire premise of your move can collapse, and no amount of careful questionnaire work fixes it.

The second is rate compatibility. Say you need the flexibility to charge a certain rate to keep a critical client, but the firm’s floor for partners at your level sits several hundred dollars an hour above it, with no real path to raise yours substantially over time. That’s a structural mismatch — and far better to learn in a conversation than to discover after you’ve built your whole case. Neither of these is a reason to panic. They’re reasons to ask early.

There’s one more topic partners tend to raise — and most of them raise it at exactly the wrong time.

Compensation. My view is that you generally leave the detailed comp conversation for the end — once as much value as possible has been built up in the combination. Lead with a number too early and you anchor the whole discussion before the firm has seen what your practice is really worth to them.

But there’s an exception, and it runs on the same logic as everything else here: if you have a firm minimum in mind — a number below which the move simply doesn’t make sense — and that number would be a genuine stretch for your practice or for the firm’s typical structure, then it’s worth surfacing earlier rather than later. Not the whole negotiation. Just enough that nobody spends a month on a process the math was never going to support.

So the timing, in short: a conversation or two before you invest in the document, the real deal-breakers on the table before you sink hours into it, and comp held for the end — unless a hard floor means it has to be raised sooner.

This is a lot to calibrate on your own, and it’s exactly the judgment a good recruiter earns their keep on — running the compatibility conversations short of the full LPQ submission, so you only take on the heavy lift once it’s clear the thing is worth building.