Biglaw, Bonuses, Clerkships, Money

Clerkship Bonus Watch: Will $75K Become The New Standard?

Which litigation powerhouse just upped its signing bonus for federal law clerks?

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gavel money (2)Earlier this week, we started receiving reports of Quinn Emanuel sending letters to federal law clerks touting a signing bonus of $75,000 for clerks who join the firm post-clerkship. This represented a big jump from the $50,000 going rate that Quinn and its peer firms were previously paying for lawyers coming out of a single clerkship. (Some firms pay more than $50,000 for people with two clerkships, which is increasingly common to see on a résumé, and a handful of firms pay more than $50,000 for even one clerkship — e.g., $60,000 at BuckleySandler or $175,000 at Kellogg Huber.)

Quinn Emanuel didn’t respond to our inquiry, but the reports are accurate. We got our hands on the letter, a form letter sent to chambers (not to individual clerks), which contains the following language:

When you consider options to continue your career after your clerkship, we hope you will give serious thought to Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. We are very proud of the large number of law clerks who have come to practice at our firm. We take our commitment to law clerk hiring very seriously. In fact, starting this year, we have increased our signing bonus for law clerks to $75,000.

You can read more of the letter on the next page.

Could QE’s move take the market for clerkship bonuses higher? Opinions differ, according to experts contacted by the National Law Journal:

Generally, clerkship bonuses have not changed since the recession, according to Jim Leipold, executive director of the research group National Association for Law Placement. NALP asks law firms about clerkship bonuses on the group’s annual salary survey.

For federal circuit clerks, the high bonus reported in 2015 was $75,000, and the low was $2,500, according to data more than 220 firms provided to NALP. The median was $25,000.

(Note: “federal circuit clerks” seems to refer to clerks working on regional circuit courts around the country. But it’s worth noting that some IP-focused firms will pay $75K to “Federal Circuit clerks,” i.e., clerks who worked at the IP-focused Federal Circuit in D.C.)

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For district court clerks, the high was $60,000, the low was $2,500 and the median was $20,000.

“There doesn’t seem to be any market pressure on clerk bonuses. They have been really stable for quite awhile,” Leipold told the NLJ on Wednesday. Firms, he said, don’t feel like they struggle to hire clerks, especially from the district level.

Major, Lindsey & Africa recruiter Sarah Van Steenburg said, however, the demand is ripe for bonuses to increase. Firms shrank their associate classes during the recession, and now, as work has picked up again, find themselves with smaller groups of third year to fifth year associates, she said. “By the time people get to mid-level and they have all this work, everybody’s fighting over the same 40 candidates in the market,” she said Wednesday.

Quinn Emanuel might fight with extra zeal — and not just because of its reputation as an aggressive litigation firm. With QE scaling back its summer program, thereby shrinking its pipeline of former summer associates who might join the firm post-clerkship, recruiting highly qualified young lawyers out of clerkships becomes more important than ever. So Quinn Emanuel might be a bit sui generis (as it is in a number of other ways as well).

Feel free to let us know of other firms paying clerkship bonuses exceeding $50,000 for one clerkship. We probably won’t get NY to 190 anytime soon, but Law Clerks to 75 might be a nice consolation prize.

(Flip to the next page to read the key language from the Quinn Emanuel letter.)

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