Tomorrow, associates at Goodwin Procter will receive individualized news of their bonuses. You may recall that last month, when ATL’s new director of research, Brian Dalton, compiled a list of Biglaw’s ten most generous firms — i.e., the ten firms that pay the best bonuses, when measured against their profits per partner — Goodwin did good, winning fourth place. (The firm fares well in rankings; last month, it made Crain’s list of best places to work in New York.)
Will this year’s bonuses preserve Goodwin’s good standing? Let’s find out. Although the individual amounts are being communicated tomorrow, the firm has outlined its overall approach in a memo….
At the start of this new year, what is the outlook like for legal employment? There’s certainly a fair amount of bad news out there, particularly for recent law school graduates.
But what about for denizens of Biglaw, the lawyers fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to work at the nation’s largest law firms? What does 2012 hold for them?
Earlier this month, my colleague Elie made some predictions for the legal profession. I will follow in his footsteps and venture some prophecies of my own for the year….
We’re still catching up on bonus news that broke over the holidays. Remember, if we missed your firm, please let us know at tips@abovethelaw.com.
Just after Christmas, Dechert announced its 2011 end-of-year bonuses. I guess you’d call it a “match” of the Cleary Gottlieb scale. Dechert is paying a pro-rated bonus to first-year associates and has a top payment of $42,500 for very senior associates.
But Dechert isn’t a lockstep firm. You have to meet a requirement in order to get the bonus. That requirement looks very much like an hours requirement, but Dechert doesn’t want you (or its clients) to think that they have an hours requirement — so they have some kind of nebulous performance requirement that can most easily be defined with reference to hours.
Oh, and they’ll dock you if you didn’t input your time, on time, throughout the year….
As we recently mentioned, our view is “better late than never” when it comes to bonus news. With this in mind, we are pleased to bring you the bonus announcement of Willkie Farr — which came out in December.
Given Willkie Farr’s status as a top New York law firm, you can probably guess what they did in terms of bonuses….
The pace of announcements may have slowed down a bit, but make no mistake: we’re still in associate bonus season. If you have bonus news that we haven’t covered, even announcements dating back to last month, please email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus Memo”). We’re trying to keep as accurate a record as we can of Biglawbonuses, but we can’t do it without your help. Please don’t assume that someone else will send in the memo; that’s not always the case.
Now, on to today’s bonus news, which comes to us from Kasowitz Benson. The litigation powerhouse, which describes itself as “a national law firm primarily focusing on complex and sophisticated commercial litigation, numbering 375 lawyers,” announced its bonuses last Thursday, January 5.
As we’ve been saying, it’s not that hard to give your associates a better bonus than what they’re doling out at Cravath. At the elite California firm of Irell & Manella, they do it every year.
Once again, Irell has issued bonuses that put Cravath’s to shame. No muss, no fuss — multiple sources tell us the the bonuses were much bigger than the Cravath bonuses.
As we get back to our regularly scheduled programming, it’s pretty obvious that bonus season has gotten a little bit ragged. This is what happens when the overdog, Cravath, fails to set bonuses at reasonable levels: firms get confused and try to do things to make it look like they’re clearing the ridiculously low bar Cravath has set. There are so many firms now with some kind of performance or hours mark that will allow at least one of their associates to say, “I made more this year than if I was working at Cravath.”
And that’s just the firms that have announced already. Other firms seem to be waiting to make their “year-end” bonus announcement because they don’t want to have to go back and dole out more money once somebody gets around to announcing spring bonuses. While it might be fun for Cravath and Sullivan & Cromwell to play chicken over who will announce spring bonuses first, there are a whole bunch of firms that are just sitting around waiting to find out how much they are going to have to pay.
And there are a bunch of associates who are starting to wonder if they’ll be getting any kind of bonus at all.
So who did we miss? Who still owes you a bonus announcement?
Christmas 2011 turned out to be a banner year for retailers, and most consumers felt pretty confident about the economy — but don’t tell that to the lawyers. The results are in and the vast majority of survey respondents aren’t purchasing anything fun with their bonuses.
Unlike Elie, 52% of Above the Law readers are using their year-end bonuses to pay their loan-shark student loan provider. 21% of survey respondents plan on using their “generous” bonuses to purchase something to help advance their career (lips are especially chapped in the winter months). The third largest group, at 9%, feels a little better about the housing market, and is planning on purchasing their little piece of heaven (or if they are in NYC, their very, very, very, very, very little piece heaven).
Close behind, 8% of folks who responded to our survey are calling it quits, and plan on using their bonus checks to buy a nice pair of dancing shoes and leave the practice altogether. Survey respondents were not as excited about the new Apple iPhone 4, as only 5% of people were going to use their bonuses to go wait in line at the Apple store or pepper spray their way into the neighborhood Walmart.
The three ghosts of Christmas only stopped by the homes of a small number of associates this year, as only 4% of responders to our survey planned on donating their bonuses to charity. Finally, less than 2% of survey respondents felt the need to play the lottery by investing in the stock market.
It's pronounced 'Mystal' like 'Cristal,' not to be confused with Elie's crystal ball.
Welcome back to work. I’m not going to act like a flight attendant and “welcome” you to a place we all got to at the exact same time, but I do hope your 2012 is starting off well.
In case you missed it on New Year’s Eve, we took a look back at our biggest stories of 2011. Now, let’s turn our gaze to the future. What do you think will happen in 2012?
I’ll get us started: The world will not end, nor be impacted in any special way on December 21, 2012….
In our recent post on the top 10 most generous large law firms — based on analysis by ATL’s new director of research, Brian Dalton — the firm of Hogan Lovells placed second. Under the rankings, this meant that Hogan partners are taking the second-biggest hit to their own bottom lines in order to keep their associates happy and well-compensated.
But is this still the case today? Based on what we’re hearing about the most recent Hogan bonuses, announced shortly before Christmas, one wonders whether the Ho-Love partners have turned from Santas into Scrooges….
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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Tomorrow, associates at Goodwin Procter will receive individualized news of their bonuses. You may recall that last month, when ATL’s new director of research, Brian Dalton, compiled a list of Biglaw’s ten most generous firms — i.e., the ten firms that pay the best bonuses, when measured against their profits per partner — Goodwin did good, winning fourth place. (The firm fares well in rankings; last month, it made Crain’s list of best places to work in New York.)
Continue reading “Associate Bonus Watch: Goodwin Procter Makes Good”
