Associate Bonus Watch: Latham & Watkins Weighs In

In general, Lathamites seem quite pleased by their bonuses, which take Davis Polk as a baseline and go up from there.

Last Friday, Latham & Watkins announced associate bonuses. It has taken us a little while to report the news because we don’t like to do bonus write-ups until we have a decent number of reactions, and that didn’t happen until recently for Latham. Here at Above the Law, we take our role as Biglaw bonus chronicler seriously, and we want our stories to reflect generally prevailing opinion at a firm, not just a handful of outliers.

The general opinion at Latham about the 2014 bonuses appears to be quite positive. Some representative responses (of varying degrees of excitement):

  • “Woohoo — finally the firms are making it rain!”
  • “As always, the announcement was last Friday and said we’d be paid this Friday. I’m a mid-level and billed [around 2000] hours with [strong reviews] and got [a few thousand] above the Davis Polk amount. Same was true for everyone I talk to. Very happy.”
  • “Latham bonuses were just announced and are amazing! Base bonus is Davis Polk, mine is more than $10K higher (without being a high biller). Love it!”

Of course, it’s very rare to see universal acclaim of bonuses. A minority feel that the bump above DPW for hard workers wasn’t big enough:

Davis Polk, with a very small sweetener for high billers, and associates aren’t pleased.

In fairness to Latham, though, Davis Polk set a very high bar this year — a bar that several firms have failed to meet, as we’ve chronicled in these pages. Complaining that you didn’t get enough above Davis won’t win a Latham associate much sympathy.

We reached out to a Latham partner for comment on the LW bonuses; here’s what this partner had to say:

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Latham had a very good year in 2014, with all departments firing on all cylinders, and we were happy to roughly double our total bonus pool from 2013, and share with our very hard working associates.

Congratulations to Latham lawyers, both the partners and the associates, on an excellent 2014. You can flip to the next page for the full memo, which shows “base” bonuses at the Davis scale, median bonuses slightly higher than Davis, and top bonuses substantially higher than Davis.

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