NA10 Launches Tokens per Partner Ranking; Partners Immediately Begin Repeating Themselves

The Unbillable Rankings Desk has replaced profits per partner with tokens per partner as the principal measure of performance among the NA10, prompting several managing partners to ask whether that announcement could be longer.

Bellwether Voss leads the inaugural table after adding a mandatory instruction to every prompt: reproduce the entire conversation, including previous reproductions, before answering. Its account briefly reached the provider's enterprise limit during a request to confirm Tuesday.

Tokens per partner: the leaders

Extract from the token table. These positions measure token consumption, independently of the firms' existing NA10 standing.

Morrow Flint has requested a recount. Its submission originally omitted a six-week exchange in which an AI was asked to make a clause more commercial, less commercial, commercial in a different way, and closer to the first version without returning to it.

Methodology

The ranking divides verified annual token consumption by the number of equity partners on the census date. Input and output both count. Failed attempts, abandoned drafts and requests to start again count. The panel rejected a proposal to exclude work nobody read, citing comparability concerns.

Quality is assessed through a separate questionnaire, which has not yet been commissioned.

Firms must supply provider invoices and a signed declaration that none of their consumption resulted from an associate deliberately leaving a loop running overnight. Loops authorised by a partner qualify as strategic investment.

Bellwether Voss's Director of Legal Operations, Victoria Ames, confirmed that its largest recorded matter concerned whether a document should say “shall” or “will”. The instruction history now exceeds the document by a factor of 38,000.

“The firm produced fewer answers this year, but significantly more evidence that it had asked,” she said.

Partner reactions

The new measure has already reached compensation discussions. One Bellwether Voss partner claimed all consumption generated by a client relationship he originated in 1998, including an intern's question about the office printer.

Another argued that prompt origination should attach to the first person to say “we ought to use AI”, making most of the firm's total his.

A three-part attribution form now distinguishes originating partner, supervising partner and partner whose name should appear on the originating partner's form. The person typing the prompt is recorded as a disbursement.

Morrow Flint has introduced a 4,000-token minimum for internal questions. Associates submitting shorter instructions receive automated coaching: “Could you provide more background on why you have not provided more background?”

Its most improved partner appended his entire collected thought leadership to a request for the Wi-Fi password. A firm spokesperson described the result as an unusually successful deployment of existing knowledge assets.

Asked whether the additional consumption had helped any clients, the Rankings Desk referred enquiries to its Client Outcomes Survey. Registration requires a separate subscription and the name of a partner willing to complete it.

Next year's submission portal is open. Entrants are invited to elaborate.