Based on the chart below, which is based on 35 years worth of large law firm data, the answer appears to be yes. The chart enables us to compare two very simple trendlines. (1) the percentage of lawyers in an NLJ 250 law firms who have the title of Associates, and (2) what the percentage of lawyers in these same firms with the title of Partner.
The chart above was generated by my colleague, Evan Parker-Stephen, who is Director of Analytics at Lawyer Metrics. I asked Evan to crunch this data after earlier research revealed that that associate hiring at all law firms that participate in the OCI process was down over 50% between 2002 and 2012. See Sea Change, NALP Bulletin