One casualty of our current economic turmoil may be the customary career path for many professionals. Just as the economic turmoil of the 1970s roiled the expectations of many members of the post-World War II generation who were employed in manufacturing, our current economic crisis reveals ripples of a similar earthquake affecting the ranks of professions once considered to have almost ca-nonical career ladders. Ranks of financial MBAs have been forced to reconsider the long-term viability of their career options. Doctors are likely to encounter a sea change in professional expectations as the medical bubble bursts and some sort of reform of our health insurance practices evolves. Academia is just beginning to reckon with the air leaking out of a higher education bubble that was generations in the making.

Even lawyers are not immune. This summer, a major international law firm, Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe of San Francisco, announced it would end the practice of promoting and compensating associates in lockstep fashion according to their yearly class peer group. This practice, nearly universal at large and midsize law firms, is basically an up-or-out system. For many years, associates have either stayed on the treadmill of progress towards partnership–by becoming a star in terms of high quality billable hours and showing promise in rainmaking skills–or have left firms. Orrick intends to replace the up-or-out system with a multi-track system.

Under the multi-track system, non-partner lawyers will be placed in, and compensated according to, one of three different tracks: partner track, custom track and career track. The partner track will resemble somewhat the current up-or-out system that places a premium on developing stars, but instead of six to eight levels of associates grouped by class year, there will be three levels sorted by skill level. The custom track would be personalized for associates more interested in developing their legal practice with some lifestyle accommodation. The career track would be geared to attorneys handling more routine work.

This development challenges the long-standing operating assumption of associate de-velopment at many law firms: that each associate will either become something of a star or leave. This assumption is not limited to law firms, of course, but operates in many professional contexts. If you are a professional, you should be on the watch for signs of similar developments in your field.

One important consequence of this development is that the compensation curve for many lawyers will not be as steep as it has been in the past generation, although this may represent a return to more historical patterns. What is new here is not so much the notion of tracks but the greater transparency of them. For the past couple of decades, many associates in large and midsize firms have complained about the lack of transparent choices in their career path: the fear of appearing to be less than zealous in the pursuit of superstardom has muted the expression of that desire of many for more choices. But with greater choices comes the necessity for greater self-awareness and responsibility in forging one’s own career path. Developments such as this underscore the importance for all professionals of knowing what is important to them and prioritizing their goals.