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Proof?
I plead judicial notice. You can also ask any of the legal/finance posters here how biglaw works. You learn the law by doing repetitive detail-oriented shit over and over, while paying attention to the wider context of the job. Then, as you gain seniority, you've seen more and more of the strategic decisions, edge cases, long-term action-outcome links, etc. until you can start taking point on those. As you develop a track record, bigger customers will trust you with bigger things, and you can build relationships with them to keep them coming to your firm for work (you're going to need that because, even as a partner, your pay is very much tied directly to how much you earn the firm). By the time you're an elder statesman, your job is to make high-level decisions that you can only make well from atop a mountain of experience, and also to manage and mentor younger lawyers so that they can go through their work and learn the ropes without crashing into an unknown unknown and getting burned. A lot of white-collar professions work this way.
Funnily enough, law did used to have a boomer-protecting structure of the sort you decry: the firm's profits would generally be split between all partners based on lockstep seniority, with the juniors earning less and the seniors more as they go on. People were fine with that because the junior partners knew they had a job for life unless they screwed up horrifically, and expected to get that seniority in time. I have some thoughts on why this system disappeared, but that's a bit beyond the scope of your question.
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