At the beginning of 2009, we were tracking salary freezes as law firms across the country froze their salaries at 2008 levels, rather than instituting lockstep raises based on seniority. Our most recent salary freeze round-up was in February. (We also acknowledged those that had raises as normal.)
Since then though, the salary freeze watch has been replaced by the salary cut watch. Rather than keeping salaries at 2008 levels, some firms are cutting back to 1998 levels.
Okay, not really. Salaries aren’t quite in line with the days of Ally McBeal, but some pay stubs are starting to resemble those of 2005.
So what about those firms that instituted “slurpee freezes” back in January? These firms said they were keeping salaries at 2008 levels, but that they planned to revisit the decision later in the year. It was assumed at the time that they would be revisiting in order to raise salaries, but that has not been the case.
If your firm hasn’t “revisited” the decision, that might be a good thing. None of those with slurpee freezes decided to raise salaries, though quite a few cut them. Specifics after the jump.
We checked in with a number of firms on the slurpee freeze list. Many thanks to Karen Sosa for her help on this — you’ll be learning more about her next week.
Some firms got back to us. Some did not. If you have any updates, feel free to e-mail them to us or to add information in the comments. THE SLURPEE FREEZE LIST – CHECKING IN
Alston & Bird – looks like they’re still frozen
Andrews Kurth – looks like they’re still frozen
Arnold & Porter – looks like they’re still frozen
Baker & McKenzie – when the firm froze, it said it would revisit the decision June 30. But in April the firm became the first Vault top 50 firm to cut salaries.
Bingham McCutchen – still frozen. “Nothing new to report,” says a Bingham spokesperson.
Chadbourne & Parke – it revisited the decision in order to pour out some slurpee. Chadbourne cut base salaries in April.
Fish & Richardson – it revisited the decision in June and is apparently not cutting salaries this year.
Fulbright & Jaworski – looks like they’re still frozen
Katten Muchin – looks like they’re still frozen
K&L Gates – when the firm froze, it said it would revisit the decision in July. We doubt its associates are expecting salary raise fireworks next month though.
Haynes and Boone – looks like they’re still frozen
Mayer Brown – Freeze is permanent this year. “Salaries will remain at their current levels through the end of 2009,” said a spokesman. No word as to plans for salaries for new associates starting in 2010.
McDermott Will & Emery – its slurpee is frozen solid. The firm announced in March that the salary freeze would remain in effect for the rest of 2009.
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
At the beginning of 2009, we were tracking salary freezes as law firms across the country froze their salaries at 2008 levels, rather than instituting lockstep raises based on seniority. Our most recent salary freeze round-up was in February. (We also acknowledged those that had raises as normal.)
