Portability in New Orleans is a professional rule before it is a compensation model. Louisiana Rule 5.6 says a lawyer shall not participate in offering or making a partnership, shareholders, operating, employment, or similar agreement that restricts the right to practice after the relationship ends, except an agreement concerning benefits upon retirement. The same rule bars a settlement term that restricts the right to practice. The commentary's stated purpose, quoting Minge v. Weeks, 629 So. 2d 545, 547 (La. App. 4 Cir. 1993), is the client's freedom to choose counsel. The Fourth Circuit sits in this city. The case is local authority, not a Houston analogy.
Minge was an employment agreement, and the clause was specific. If the lawyer left and then accepted work from a firm client, the firm would take 80 percent of the net fee. The lawyer left in February 1993. A client discharged the firm and retained him. The court held the employment contract unenforceable to the extent it required a fee division other than the rule in Saucier v. Hayes Dairy Products, 373 So. 2d 102 (La. 1979). The firm's right to recover costs it had advanced was not taken away. A hiring committee that treats every capital account, every unfinished-file split, and every retirement benefit as an 80 percent penalty has not read the opinion. A committee that ignores an 80 percent penalty because the document is titled "partnership" has not read Rule 5.6(a), which names partnership agreements in the same sentence as employment agreements.
Notice is the second document, and it does not have a Louisiana week-count. ABA Formal Opinion 489, issued 4 December 2019, says lawyers may leave and clients may choose counsel. It says the ethics rules do not allow non-competition clauses in partnership, member, shareholder, or employment agreements. A firm may require advance notice. The period is the minimum necessary, in the circumstances, for clients to decide, for files to be assembled, for staffing to be adjusted, and for firm property to be secured. A fixed period that interferes with the client's choice, or that is used to punish the departure, can conflict with Rule 5.6. The Louisiana State Bar Association's switching-firms page sends members to that opinion. It does not add a statutory number of weeks. A start-date memo that inserts "90 days, market" is writing a figure neither the rule nor the opinion published.
La. R.S. 23:921 is the statute hiring committees reach for, and it is the commercial employment rule. A contract that restrains someone from a lawful profession is null unless the statute's exception applies. An employee may agree not to carry on a similar business, and not to solicit the employer's customers, in a specified parish or parishes, for not more than two years after employment ends, while the employer still carries on that business. That exception is real. It is not a license to assign a law firm's clients. Rule 5.6 still governs the lawyer. A two-year, multi-parish covenant in a partnership deed does not become enforceable because 23:921 would tolerate a similar clause in a sales employee's contract. Substance controls the title. A clause that stops the partner practicing law in Orleans Parish is a restriction on practice. A clause that only returns a client file the client asked to leave behind is not.
The conflicts screen is part of the same underwrite. A book that looks portable on a spreadsheet is not portable if the receiving firm cannot open the matters. Confidential information moves with the lawyer even when the client does not. The guarantee follows the clients who can actually be asked, and who then choose. It does not follow the pitch. On the Houston partner line that covers this market, counter-offers landed on 39 percent of the 18 closed searches, and the median from a written offer to acceptance was 17 working days. Those two figures are the fight after the letter, not a substitute for the letter.
