Last

List the firms that have already announced that salaries are NOT frozen. Shame the freezers into making them keep up with the real firms out there.

Like another Gumponce said (sorta): "Law firms are like a box of chocolates. You don't know which one is gonna ream you next until you bend over and find a big brown mess on your spread cheeks."

Sheep?

My SHEEP's Gump is gunna be Akin real soon.

Nailing It

4 That may be one of the stupidest, most unriginal, and uncomical comments I've seen on ATL, and that's saying something.

Burn Biglaw Burn.

Why is Kash doing all the Elie posts? Is he having a hard time getting out of bed?

#4 clearly has problems managing his explosive bowel syndrome. Must be tough.

3: If you think that's going to make any difference, you are truly naive. The major firms ALREADY know who's done what, who's still on the fence, even which way they're leaning. Blogs like this are NOT part of the critical information loop. Firms do not rely on them. They have much better and tighter sources of information.

I think salary freezes are a much bigger deal than reduced bonuses. Often the difference is greater (especially for those who could find enough work to meet their hours and won't get the full bonus anyway), plus there's the added uncertainty of what happens once the freeze is over - does you salary increase by one level, or do you jump two levels up to where you would have been?

I am going to have a SHEEP Threesome for New Years and maybe a CWT NY 05 associate for dessert.

How about firms reduce salaries for first, second and third years, and keep the current pay scale for fourth year and above? That would reflect the reality of the world - junior associates are clueless and worthless.

Does any happen to know whether Keith Fink is an extortionist?

Anyone know the salary status at Wilson Sonsini, Cooley, Gunderson, MoFo and Morgan Lewis?

15 -- I think he is. I just have this nagging suspicion.

My SHEEP's Gump is gunna be Akin real soon.

Nailing It

You are all losers.

Is it considered crass to nail a sheep while wearing a lamb skin condom? I just don't want there to be any awkwardness on this special night.

NAILING SHEEP to 190 in '09, bitches!

Kash, flip over. I want to try doggie.

Morgan Lewis just gave each associate in the San Francisco office a set of SHAW WOWS as a bonus. They're made in Germany so you know their good.

My gump, my gump, my GUMP! My lovely lady SHEEP! Check it out!

I realize that most lawyers have little if any basic understanding of economics but in a deflationary enviroment can we "expect" standard pay increases? Most of our clients are already negotiating cheaper rates (or so the partners say). Hopefully there will be merit based increases but to expect across the board salary increases just because you're a year older is kind of naive.

Say you work for a firm with 500 associates whose raises are all $15,000. The firm would save 7.5 million by not increasing salaries accross the board, and could then go back and increase some salaries at its discretion.

To be honest, I look forward to that day. As somebody who had a real job before I went back to law school, merit based raises are the way to go. Some of these associates are just glorified doc review bitches and frankly don't deserve a raise.

ML hasn't made the call yet. But I do like the idea of the Sham Wows...

ML in DC hasn't made the call yet. But I do like the idea of the Sham Wows...

My bonii are always large and my salary remains unfrozen. Balls deep, baby!

25

MOST of you reading this blog are glorified doc review monkeys. That's why I find all the incessant whining and carping by you about bonuses and salary freezes so hilarious. You're already making a lot of money compared to the vast majority of Americans, but, let's face it, you're peons and servants to the masters of capital. Slaves you are, and slaves you will be -- golden handcuffs or no.

What about a thread on 2009 summer associate pay/duration? A lot of the good firms did not include information about salaries and specific lengths. I wonder if any big firms will reduce summer salaries or shorten the lengths of the programs?

I can't believe you are whining, your cleaning lady probably makes $20k a year. Do you know how hard it is to get into a good cleaning lady school, let alone pay the $50k per year cleaning lady school tuition?

31 gets a 180

The problem with merit based pay is that firms have huge cases requiring lots of doc review, and they need associates to do it. As long as that is the case, merit based pay is unfair to those who are required to do all that doc review, because they don't have the chance to do anything of merit. If firms would institute rotations on doc review or some sort of guarantee that a single god awful case will not eat up 3 year sof an associate's career, they could then go to merit based pay.

33, in a merit-based pay system, good associates will not be put on doc review. Trust me, the partners at your firm did not spend their first three years on doc review. If there are not enough bad assocates for doc review, the firm will use contract or staff attorneys. But since you seem to think everyone gets put on doc review for years...

My Gump is Akin

34,

Since doc review is generally assigned to the most junior associates soon after they join the firm, how do firms determine that those associates are "bad" and should be put on doc review and other associates are "good" and should be put on the other monkey scribe work given to junior associates?

AG DC hires the worst associates. I personally know four and they are all, utterly retarded. The only thing the have is boobies. Seriously.

36 is right - everyone does some doc review. Then again, no one in their first couple of years deserves a "merit" raise because they're all retarded anyway.

36, every hiring firm has a group of new associates that it really wanted and a group of new associates it simply needed to fill out the ranks.
Take a look at any non-V10 biglaw firm, and notice how the school credentials of the homegrown partners are in general much better than the credentials of the median associate. There are many proxies for partner-quality and every firm knows them.

Can't a brother get a Half-Skadden reference to finish the year? Come on, Kash.

36,

These determinations are often as 39 says made before you ever walk in the door. I do think, however, it's possible for someone from not so great of a school to get on "the track" as well, if you show them you know what you're doing.

I know someone who went to a TTT and was running their own deals at a V5 by the end of their first year and supervising people 1-2 years their senior. (Granted, this person had prior business experience in the area, so they could "talk the talk")/

The truth is, you never know.

39,

You sound like an expert on law firm hiring practices. How do the law firms determine before the person works for the firm that they will be a good or bad associate? Is it based on the name of the law school that they attended? And why do the firms need to "fill out the ranks" of the firm with associates they don't think can do substantive work? Do they get credit from the government or something for creating jobs? And what if the firm has so much work that they have to give actual substantive work to the rank-fillers? Do they then have to hire laterals so that the rank-fillers can go back to doing doc review?

Thanks!

I think you determine whether someone is a "good" or "bad" associate if he or she doesn't do something inappropriate in front of the clients like pick their noses, etc. A lot of it is social grooming. Seriously. If you don't have any social skills, expect to be a doc review monkey kept far away from the clients and be one of the first laid off.

42, school + grades + law review + interviews + summer work product. No coincidence that the hiring/offer criteria also determine which associates the firm would find more useful once hired.

The firms fill out their ranks with enough people that they can bill out at $250/hour and pay $70/hour for doc review, with the expectation that these people will be fired or quit after a few years (when their salaries become too high). $250-$70 = pure profit (minus overhead). The firm could use contract attorneys but the per hour profit is lower since clients will pay much less for them and the temp agency takes a cut.

If the firm has too much substantive work then yes they would get higher-level laterals. The lateral or good associate can do the work in five hours, say, compared to the doc review monkey who needs 20 hours plus five hours of supervision.
Every firm that hires a lateral made a conscious decision that they cannot promote one of their own doc review monkeys to do the work.

39 is correct and the evidence is overwhelming, but the shiTTTschool grads have ample time to post garbage on the net....

face it, if you went to a non-top 6-10 school, you are very, very unlikely to make partner anywhere other than as a solo.

fly shiTTTbirds....FLY!

*farts*

*shits*

aww yeah

The law firm bonus model is stupid. There should be a merit based system after year 3. If you a better lawyer than most, you deserve a bigger bonus. If you billed significantly more hours of acceptable work, then you deserve more. Consequently if you are a sh*ttier lawyer or barely met the hours limit, then you should receive less. Making everyone's bonus the same in the same class year inspires only mediocracy, or even worse, laziness.

Let me try and explain something. From a corporate attorney's perspective, lockstep bonuses make sense for one very important reason: specialists. Any deal of significance will require any number of specialists to use their expertise to get the deal done. Think tax, environmental, exec. comp., IP, etc. These people do not bill as much as corporate associates typically do. But their help is essential. How do you reward the great specialists who, because of the nature of their practice, just don't put up the big numbers of hours? Lockstep bonuses do not inspire mediocrity (good firms weed the mediocre out every year, boom or bust). It inspires collegiality.

44,

42 here. I thought it was clear from my questions that I was joking and that I think you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, but I guess subtlety doesn't work on everyone. You should save your post and read it again after you've been working for a few years so you can recall with embarassment that you actually thought those factors were predictive of who the good associates in your class would be. Also, your description of firm economics is comically wrong in almost every respect down to the amount at which you think firms bill out associates doing doc review.

Happy new year. Good luck next semester.

49, the $250 is what many firms bill out first years, including when I was a first year. It is also obviously just a hypothetical example. Great nitpicking work though!
Yes obviously the hiring factors are entirely unpredictive of who the good associates will be, yet firms still stubbornly persist in using the same factors to try to hire the best associates. Amazing that no firm has wised up to this and used Moneyball-esque techniques to hire the good associates who happen to have bad grades from poor schools.

Good luck with your next year, when one day you'll perhaps learn that ad hominem attacks only serve to discredit your own points.

49

Very few dumb slackers in college and law school, who end up with low grades and/or TTTs, magically turn around and become hard working smart lawyers. But keep on telling yourself that you, as a Seton Hall below-median graduate, are as good as a HLS magna cum laude, if only biglaw gave you the chance.

hth

What if you not a better lawyer?

48, you have special consideration in your merit determination for specialists.

Think. It's not that hard.

48:

From a business perspective if one lawyer bills the minimum 2000 hours and the other bills 2500 hours, then the higher biller brought in 20% more revenue for the firm, at say, $300 an hour that would be $150,000. Should the harder working lawyer not be rewarded more?

Further, at any given firm there are good and not so good lawyers, with the vast majority being in the middle. Based on this alone, the better lawyers should be getting more and the lesser lawyers getting less.

Allowing everyone to have the same bonus provides no incentive for being a better lawyer than everyone else and/or billing more than what is required.

It is simple business sense to reward the more talented and harder working employees. However this is lost on the firms management - perhaps because they have no or little business sense.

The average working life of an attorney at a large firm is in the neigborhood of 25 years. They are associates for generally eight of those years. So lockstep compensation is only in play for a third of a career, as I'm not sure there are any lockstep partnerships left. Over the course of the first four years, half the associates leave or are pushed out. I think focusing so much time and energy on figuring our who should get how much compensation for those first four years is myopic. It can also turn your firm into a shark tank (thinka bout people bitching about hours-hoarding, padding, cutthroat behavior at work, etc.)

The number of people who receive "more" compensation than their hardworking peers is pretty minimal after four years. Obvioulsy a lot of firms have determined that paying people equally for these years is worth while.

Also, more hours do not equal a better attorney. If an associates takes half as much time to complete an assignmant as another, who's the better attorney? Obviously, work would gravitate to the associates who get things done right and fast, but that doesn;t mean they'll bill more (especially in slow times). Also, basing compensation on the billable hour incentivies padding.

If you look at firms laying off and freezing pay, there aren't too many truly lockstep fims (ie no minimum billables) in that group. So you tell me, who runs a better business?

If you could explain to me how you give special consideration to a specialist in a way that is fair and values their work in a meaningful way vis a vis other associates with completely different practices, I'd agree it is not that hard. Just valuing two associates in the same practice area is hard enough. One guy works for a complete cupcake of a partner with a relaly straightforward deal, and another works for a complete hardass psychopath on a monster deal. Both bill the same hours, but the second associate padded his hours in compensation for working with a whip-cracker. Who gets what in this scenario? Now multiply that by about 400 associates, each one with a unique work experience and I find the difficulty not worth it for a group that will be halved in four years.

the smart firms are freezing salaries for the associaTTTes now....the reckless are soon to be Great Depression PWN3D by this economy.

I could barely get into my office today for the soup and bread lines....i heard it on donny dohtch dontcha know!

50,

49 here. A person who proposes that law firms purposely and actively hire associates that they don't believe will be adequate lawyers in order to "fill the ranks (as if a law firm were a high school football team) is making an ad hominem attack on himself. I am imagining the instructions to interviewers for such a system: "Remember, James, that even if you don't think this person would be capable of being a junior associate on one of your matters, you might still want to recommend him for an offer as we always need bodies to keep the chairs warm and the staff from getting lonely. Plus, someone has to take summer associates out to lunch." Thanks for the laugh, you are the aces.

51,

I graduated many years ago with honors from a school ranked in the top 5 and worked for 6 years at a top 5 firm before going in house a couple years ago. The law schools attended by the first 5 people fired from my law firm class (for performance reasons) were, in order, Michigan, Cardozo, Harvard, Columbia and Harvard. None of those folks lasted 2 years, none of them was hired to "fill the ranks" and I'm sure that the partners who had them fired didn't care one bit about what schools they attended or what their law school grades were. Likewise, no partner was giving the Brooklyn and New York law school graduates credit for being "rank-filler" not expected to actually be able to do their jobs. The idea that firms have separate expectations for associates based on their academic credentials is so laughable only a law student could even propose it. On day one of your legal career, it's like the boot camp scene in Full Metal Jacket: everyone is just another maggot.

I wonder what the deal is with the numerous firms who haven't announced 2009 salaries yet. Don't I deserve to know how much I am being paid for the work I do tomorrow? It's amazingly disrespectful for so many firms to withhold this news, be it good or bad, from their associates. I am afraid that my firm may refuse to make any announcement and claim that this implicitly froze my salary (under the logic that they never formally announced a raise). At this point I wouldn't be at all surprised if I find out I have been frozen on September 15 when my paycheck hits the bank. And yes, I work at a V20 firm with a great reputation that I used to highly respect.

Sorry,

I meant January 15

-59

59, I have been thinking the same thing. Do firms normally, in good times, send memos confirming the yearly raises? Or were they simply assumed unless notified otherwise?

I don't know whether silence from a particular firm at the end of the fiscal year presumptively mean they raised as usual or froze.

It is incredibly distracting.

61,

My firm has always announced raises via email in the 4th quarter over the past few years (end of November or first week in December). This year they are intentionally remaining silent. I'm shocked that they are being so irresponsible and rude towards the associates. It feels like they are holding out as long as possible for an excuse to pocket a little extra cash towards PPP in 2009. I hope that Marquis Jet raises their rates so the partners feel some of the pinch when they fly to Nantucket to play golf this summer...not that it will have any effect on the associates and their crushing loan debt.

Happy New Year,

-59

59 is right. In what other salaried profession would one work without knowing what the salary is? All associates at firms that have not announced salaries should not show up until said firms announce!

Is this some kind of contracts issue? I was drunk a lot in law school.

Actually, Akin Gump has done a decent job of getting rid of parasitic partners in recent years. Now they have to focus on getting everyone to understand that it's ok if the top equity partner makes 20x the lowest paid equity partner.

AKIN DUMP. THE DC OFFICE IS TOTALLY PATHETIC. I AM SURE THERE WILL BE NO BONUSES IN ANY OTHER OFFICES. THEY ARE ALL SCARED TO DEATH THAT THE NY RAINMAKERS WILL CUT AND RUN. A TRULY PATHETIC FIRM.

All of you are maggots. Do you think for one minute that any partner knows what the fuck they are doing when it comes to compensation per associate? NO. They care only about their compensation and could give a shit less about anything else. Since the economy (stock market) is in the tank they will lay off anyone they don't like. It is all political and I can't believe you are all so naive to think it is anything but. The scum sucking pigs are losing money so you will lose your job. Get ready to work at Wal-Mart and hope you can find a place cheap enough to live and maybe have some canned tuna or ramen noodles to eat. Forget about raises and bonuses. Unless you are a trust fund baby you better start making nice to mommy and daddy so you will have a roof over your oh so smart and educated asses!

Is this the same Dave Botter who withdrew our summer offers? Clearly they give him the good assignments. If Akin freezes salaries, I would not want to be Botter next year, trying to recruit at the V5 schools. One poster said the firm is worried about losing "NY rainmakers." You would think those rainmakers would tell Botter (who is a bankruptcy lawyer, which is Akin's only real strong suit) to pay for top talent. If Akin freezes salaries, Dave Botter will be an ATL assclown twice this year. Bottom line (from the little I've learned) - if you want to do any corporate, don't go to Akin. If you want to do bankruptcy/restructuring, go to Weil/Kirkland/Skadden/Dewey for debtors work and Milbank/Paul Hastings/Quinn for creditors work (Akin as a last resort). If you are litigation-leaning, there are about 30 firms to go to before Akin, which won't withdraw offers or freeze salaries.

Pay freeze probably inevitable at AG. AG is punting until hopefully March 09 until they figure out how profitable the year will be and what other firms do. Follow the leaders.

I don't get your point 67. Is it to coax Akin into making another decision as regards it's compensation and bonus model, or is it to trash Akin as a shifty firm?

Regarding boni's and comp, from reading the memo, Akin seems right in line with the so-called NY market, and (for what it's worth) even expressed a commitment to increase that number should particular associates merit it. And regarding the reputation of the firm, trust me 67, while it was embarrasing that Akn (and a number of other big firms) overcommitted in NY and LA for summer associate spots, that pales in comparison to the many firms that have been laying associates off for months!

The rep of Akin NY is certainly bankruptcy driven, but all the other shops known for their transactional practices are in the toilet. Akin DC is one of the 5 or so "DC" firms to work at. And Akin's lit practice is certainly solid.

Bottom line, Akin has never been and will never be a V10 firm, but that shit only matters to silly law students and summer associates anyway. Akin is a strong firm.

69 = David Botter . . . and Akin is a crap hole (especially BK).

67 - Since when is Quinn Emanuel a major player in bankruptcy?

71 - Quinn isn't really a major player in bankruptcy, but they do nab the plum conflicts assignments (like Lehman).

72 - So 67 is wrong then. If you are interested in doing bankruptcy, why go to a place that mainly gets retained as conflicts counsel over a place like Akin that regularly gets retained to represent committees?

Frankly, I think 67 is a Milbank troll, given that the firms listed are either Milbank or firms that have practices built around ex-Milbank lawyers (Kirplani at Quinn and Despins at Paul Hastings).

73 - since when is Akin regularly retained? They did Worldcom and that's about it. And that was years ago.

Akin actually has a great tax group. Top quality and reliable clients. Their bankruptcy is good, but clients are one and done and the lawyers are more relationship types than great lawyers. Litigation has some stars in DC, but not much in NY or elsewhere. Corporate is liek non-existent (except for the big Adult Friend Finder IPO).

Akin is apparently very prestige-conscious (I was a B/B+ avg. at a V5 school who didn't get a callback). I decided on an LA firm, but I had callbacks from Skadden, Boies, Kirkland. None of my interviewers went to a V20 school and one, who is the head of the NY office, went to SUNY law. I'm back in NY at a great boutique and glad I didn't go to that firm (which was my top choice). Sounds like they've lost a lot of partners, though, so I'm cool.

Does anyone know whether Akin has been meeting all weekend with OMM?

74 - Do you follow Bankruptcy much? Akin is currently representing creditors committees in Washington Mutual and several of the home builder cases, including Tousa among others. Akin is also representing a noteholder group in Lehman Brothers. Chambers and Partners ranks Akin's Bankruptcy group as among the best in New York, DC, TX and the country in general. You are either a troll or utterly clueless.

76 - That guy from SUNY is a better lawyer than you will ever be.