Associate Bonus Watch: Boies Schiller Pays Up To $350K (Again)

Bonuses at Boies Schiller aren't quite as big this year, but the average bonus still falls just shy of $100,000.

Unless we get surprising bonus news out of the last two Fab Five firms — Davis Polk and Sullivan & Cromwell, for those of you keeping track at home (or the office, your second home) — Biglaw bonuses this year will be the same as last year. Considering that last year’s bonuses were quite generous, I viewed maintaining the high bonus levels as “very good news.” But there’s an argument to be made — and was in fact just made, by my dissenting colleague Joe Patrice — that this year’s bonuses should be viewed as disappointing.

It’s a lot harder to be disappointed by bonuses not going up, however, when your bonuses go as high as $350,000 — which brings us to the bonuses of Boies Schiller & Flexner, the litigation powerhouse founded by the legendary David Boies. The BSF bonuses were announced and paid out yesterday.

Earlier this afternoon, I had my annual chat with David Boies about his firm’s bonuses. Here’s a lightly edited and condensed write-up of our conversation (which assumes basic familiarity with Boies Schiller & Flexner’s unusual compensation system, in which associates essentially share in the revenue they generate).

DL: When we spoke last year, when your firm paid our record bonuses, you described the 2014 bonuses as “unsustainably large” — and predicted that 2015 might be a more relaxed year, at least “relaxed” by Boies Schiller standards. Tell us about the bonuses this year.

DB: Our bonuses just went out. Associate reviews are ongoing, but we try to give everyone their bonus information on the same day so you don’t have the phenomenon of people wondering what their bonus is compared to someone else’s.

For associates in our New York, D.C., and California offices who have been with the firm for more than a year, the bonuses ranged from $20,000 to $350,000. The associates who got $350,000 bonuses came from two different classes — one that you’d expect, and one that you wouldn’t. One came from the class of 2007, and one came from the class of 2011. The class of 2011 is a big class for us; they were very, very active this year, and their average bonus was $120,000. The only class with a higher average was the class of 2007, with $155,000 — but that’s a much smaller class, and much more senior.

[Ed. note: Under the Cravath scale, bonuses ranged from $15,000 to $100,000. The class of 2011 bonus was $65,000, about half the BSF amount, and the class of 2007 bonus was $100,000, about two-thirds the BSF amount.]

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DL: And what about the overall bonus numbers? One source told us that the bonuses “seem to be down from last year’s levels, though of course higher than Cravath and others.”

DB: Overall, we had slightly more people who got $100,000 or more in bonus than people who got less than $100,000. The average for all classes in the New York, D.C., and California offices, for associates here for a year or more, was $95,000. If you take everyone senior to the class of 2014, the average was $100,000, and if you take everyone from the class of 2011 and forward, the average is $115,000. So the bonuses went up with seniority, although not as much as I thought they would.

These numbers are a shade lower than last year. They confirmed my qualitative impression that we had more people below $100,000 this year than we did before. Some of this reflects people who didn’t participate in contingency cases, and some of this reflects people billing fewer hours.

DL: So was 2015 a better year in terms of lifestyle or work-life balance for Boies Schiller associates compared to 2014?

The pace this year was more sustainable. Despite having similar numbers from people at the top, overall things were more sustainable, and we did maybe a slightly better job of leveling the work out. The workload this year was noticeably but not hugely lower than it was last year.

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Part of what you’re seeing in these bonuses, which are on the whole comparable to what we’ve paid before, is that we had very substantial contingency-fee collections this year. To the extent that they generated premiums, which they did, that elevated the bonuses.

For example, we had antitrust cases involving LCD and CRT technology, handled by two different groups. There were very large collections in the LCD cases, which are farther along, and some collections in the CRT cases. In addition, we have been representing plaintiffs who were victims of the feeder funds in the Madoff Ponzi scheme, and those cases were finally resolved this year — not all of that money is coming this year, some of it will come in early next year, but that was another contributor. We resolved our case against the Bank of China, and we resolved the Arizona Iced Tea case. So all of this contributed to keeping bonuses high, even though the workload went down.

DL: Anything else you’d like to add about this year’s bonuses?

DB: Our philosophy on bonuses remains the same. [Ed. note: As Boies explained it last year, “These bonuses are both fair and in the self-interest of the firm…. The ability to do the kind of cases we do — and to earn the kind of money we earn as partners, which is a lot more than the associates — depends on hiring, training, and rewarding the best people.”]

The only thing that’s different now is the scale. Could we sustain this pace on associate compensation as we grew and scaled up as a firm? There were some doubts five years ago, but we have. These bonuses probably modestly reduced our partner compensation, so you might now see some reduction in our partnership comp vis-à-vis our peer firms, although some of this is also due to our scaling up.

We’ve always had these premium-generating, contingency cases. When we were a firm of 75 lawyers, a case like the vitamins antitrust case had an explosive effect. Now, as a firm of 255 lawyers or so, it’s spread out more, so we have less of an ability to finance very large associate bonuses out of that excess.

It’s still very much our view that this is the right thing to do and in the long run very important to our culture and to the quality of our practice. It just becomes more complicated economically as we get bigger.

DL: Congratulations on the firm’s continued success at even greater scale, and thanks as always for taking the time to chat!

Earlier: Associate Bonus Watch (2014): Boies Schiller Pays Up To $350K
Associate Bonus Watch (2013): A $300K Bonus At Boies Schiller
Associate Bonus Watch (2012): Big Bucks at Boies Schiller
Associate Bonus Watch (2011): Boies Schiller Shellacks Cravath
Associate Bonus Watch (2010): Boies Schiller Sets the Bonus Bar
Associate Bonus Watch (2009): Boies Will Be Boies


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