Biglaw

Cravath Hath Spoken -- And Beats Milbank For Senior Associates!

Now, it's a party.

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Cravath Swaine & Moore, the nominal Biglaw salary leader, has finally joined the party Milbank started last week.

Cravath has matched salaries along the Milbank scale for junior associates. For midlevel associates, the Cravath scale is a $5,000 bump up from where Milbank set the market, at senior levels the bump goes up to $10,000. And Cravath is giving out special bonuses like Simpson Thacher.

Here’s the memo, sent to us by tipsters:

We are pleased to announce that the Firm will pay a special bonus and increase associate base salaries as follows:

Bonuses will be paid on June 29. An associate must be at the Firm on June 29 to be eligible for the bonus. Associates who have been with the Firm for only part of the year or are working part-time will receive a pro-rated portion of the applicable class-level bonus.

The base salary increase is effective July 1 and will be reflected in paychecks commencing on July 6. Summer associate salaries will also be increased to match the new first year associate weekly salary, effective July 1.

We would like to express the Firm’s appreciation for all your efforts.

Appreciation indeed. Cravath might be late to the game, but now that it’s here, we can expect nearly every other major Biglaw firm to follow. S&C will be here soon. Skadden, Davis Polk, Debevoise, they’re all coming now. This is the new Biglaw associate salary.

Which may or may not be a good thing for firms that don’t have Cravath’s flow. As with the last raise, Cravath could have blown other firms out of the water, and created real salary separation between, say, the top-50 firms and everybody else.

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But why do that? Milbank was already out of the gate at $190K, many firms were following along, why spend money if you don’t have to?

On-campus recruiting is right around the corner. I assume most firms will get on this scale now, to make things right before they have to recruit new talent.

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Earlier:

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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