The implosion of US law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges, whose elite restructuring experts once advised on Lehman Brothers’ collapse, confirms that lawyers really are the new bankers — massive pay checks and destabilizing bank runs included.

After it decided to wind down operations following a raft of senior departures, one must consider to what extent management missteps, including a lack of top-line growth and a botched succession plan, contributed to Weil’s unraveling.

But Big Law rivals shouldn’t kid themselves the same couldn’t happen to some of them. It’s the logical consequence of an industry engaging in a Darwinian war for talent that’s caused compensation for superstars to balloon to as much as $40 million a year. In such a mercenary environment, the social ties and loyalty binding even a near century-old legal heavyweight like Weil can more easily fray.

“Ironically it’s the super-elite law firms serving the world of private capital who are now structurally more vulnerable,” Scott Gibson, director of legal recruitment consultancy Edwards Gibson, tells me. “The more rainmakers there are with portable client relationships, the more concentration risk. If they depart, it can turn into a self-fulfilling run on the partnership, even where the underlying business remains strong and highly profitable.”

Weil has been on the ropes for weeks after big names like Chris Machera, its co-head of private equity, and Michael Aiello, Weil’s mergers supremo, announced they were leaving, and incoming Executive Partner Ramona Nee turned down the top job.

The exodus became unstoppable. Law partnerships are potentially vulnerable to this sort of thing because their main assets are people. When a better offer comes along or things get dicey, it’s rational for these high-earners to defect. Staying put could mean they end up receiving a lower profit share or are left on the hook financially if the firm collapses. This paper by Yale Law professor John Morley, comparing the self-reinforcing dynamic to a bank run, is an excellent explainer of what can go wrong.

Unlike in the UK, American lawyers can’t be barred by non-compete agreements from jumping to another firm (a stipulation that might now be worth revisiting).

There have been several high-profile law firm implosions over the years and several more were avoided only via combinations with other firms. (Weil, too, tried to find a merger partner, but its talks with Willkie Farr & Gallagher were unsuccessful.) But unlike the failure of Dewey & LeBoeuf in 2012, which went on a hiring spree that left it saddled with too much debt, Weil’s downfall isn’t due to financial recklessness. It brought in more than $2 billion in revenue last year and reportedly has no debt and few liabilities besides property leases.

Reflecting on the “significant churn” in the legal industry, Weil’s Co-Managing Partner Jonathon Soler told the Financial Times in September he doesn’t believe the industry’s job hopping dynamic is “necessarily healthy.”

He’s right, but it’s hard to resist bulking up by poaching staff as it’s the best defense against being destabilized by one’s own rainmakers leaving. Weil was slower to engage in the talent wars and only belatedly realized it needed to get bigger and rejigger its compensation system. “The collegiality that was valued by some became a weakness,” a former Weil lawyer tells me. “It’s a huge shame.”Over the past few years Big Law has moved away from paying counsel according to seniority and has instead orientated compensation more towards an individual’s results, leading to greater disparities within firms.

The “eat-what-you-kill” model benefits top performers, particularly those serving the titans of private equity. Their clients tend not to penny pinch on complex legal matters and they create masses of work from their transactions and financial engineering.

It’s true that law firms try to incentivize collegiality and ensure individuals don’t hoard client relationships. And Paul, Weiss is among the firms that have sought to ease tensions over money by limiting their partners’ ability to know what peers are paid (so-called black-box compensation).

Kirkland & Ellis is taking this a step further by ceasing publicly disclosing its average profits per equity partner, which until now have been included in The American Lawyer’s annual rankings.

But it’s hard to reconcile how high fees, job-hopping and financial opacity benefit customers, particularly as artificial intelligence is making more humdrum legal tasks much easier.

That puts the onus on clients to push back on excessive legal bills and ask whether their counsel really needs to jump ship. Otherwise, they might find firms that have faithfully served their legal needs for years suddenly cease to exist.