Associate Bonus Watch: No Billable Hours Requirement Still Equals High Bonuses At This Firm

A law firm finally decided to come out of hiding to announce its year-end bonuses.

As we mentioned earlier this week, it’s been a while since we’ve seen your average 2014 bonus announcement. Perhaps everyone else’s firms decided to batten down the hatches in preparation for the awe-inspiring proclamation of Boies Schiller’s bonuses, which soared to the heights of $350,000 for the hardest-working associates in the Biglaw game.

Of course, no one is going to have the gall to match the Boies bonuses, but associates across the country are crossing their fingers and hoping that if their firm hasn’t announced yet, it might be one of the first to adopt the Davis Polk scale, which climbed even higher than the Simpson Thacher scale for midlevel and senior associates.

Today, we’ve got news of a law firm that decided to come out of hiding to announce its year-end bonuses. Which firm was it, and which bonus scale did it follow?

It’s none other than Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft, and unsurprisingly, the firm matched the Simpson scale, like most of the firms that have released their 2014 year-end bonus information thus far. As usual, associates at Cadwalader will receive their bonus payouts at the end of February. The full memo from from Pat Quinn, the firm’s managing partner-elect, can be found on the following page.

There’s nothing really exciting about this news, save for the fact that last year, the firm decided to eliminate billable hours requirements from its bonus eligibility standards. Here’s more information on Cadwalader’s plan from Law360 (sub. req.):

Patrick T. Quinn, managing partner-elect at the New York City-headquartered law firm, told Law360 the change would create a more collaborative framework for evaluating talent and would give junior lawyers the opportunity to have more input into their own development.

“Removing a specific billable hours requirement for bonuses is consistent with our firm’s emphasis on excellence of work, rather than quantity of work, and better aligns our incentives with those of our clients — who are interested in achieving excellent results in the most efficient way possible,” Quinn said.

We believe these latest bonuses were the first to be subject to Cadwalader’s professional development initiative. The plan sounds great in theory, but we’re not sure how well it’ll work out in practice. If you thought that this quality over quantity initiative meant that associates would be able to log fewer billable hours and experience fewer sleepless nights, then we’ve got an awesome bridge to sell you.

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Congratulations to everyone at Cadwalader. Look at it this way: at least you’ll be able to look forward to getting your hands on all of that cash in the new year.

(Don’t forget to flip to the next page to see the full Cadwalader bonus announcement.)

Cadwalader Detaches Associate Bonuses From Billable Hours [Law360]

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