Alston & Bird lost four partners from its Washington office to DLA Piper on Tuesday, according to this report from The Lawyer:
Alston & Bird’s Washington office was rocked yesterday (Tuesday 2 October) by the exit of four partners to DLA Piper, including DC co-managing partner and chair of the firm’s executive committee, Frank Rusty Conner.
The departing group also includes the former head of Alston’s legislative and public policy group, Tom Boyd. Boyd joins DLA Piper as co-head of the firm’s government affairs practice in Washington with Governor Jim Blanchard.
The exit of the four partners will be a significant blow to Alston’s corporate ambitions. Conner, at the firm for almost 30 years, was also co-head of its corporate group while the two other, as yet unnamed partners, are understood to be from the corporate group.
Sadly, the music-loving law firm of Nixon Peabody is not on this afternoon’s list of five Vault 100 firms to talk about. And don’t hold your breath — we won’t reach NP until we hit the 70′s.
Here are the firms that are on the table:
We’ve previously covered Denver and Hartford. Today our series of posts profiling associate compensation in various smaller legal markets — smaller than New York or Washington or Los Angeles, at least — turns to Philadelphia.
What’s going on in the City of Brotherly Love? Based on some recentarticles we’ve read, it seems that the standard starting salary in Philly hovers between $135,000 and $145,000. At $135K: Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis; Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll; Duane Morris; Blank Rome; Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen; and DLA Piper. At $145K: Morgan, Lewis & Bockius; Dechert; Drinker Biddle & Reath; and Pepper Hamilton.
Will Philly move to the $160K scale anytime soon? If so, when? And who will lead the charge?
In the cheesesteak metropolis, starting salaries aren’t the only issue. Per a commenter:
[W]hen you do [Philadelphia], please make sure to point out our mid-level comp which sucks. We get about a 5k raise per year (though [in] some years we do get 10k but not most). After 7 years we’re just clearing 200k.
The only real holdouts now are Bingham McCutchen and Reed Smith, both huge firms with big California presences and fairly high profits that could probably absorb the raise.
Firms lower on the list with lower profits per partner like Littler Mendelson and Sedgwick, Detert, Moran & Arnold likely won’t match.
Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner and Townsend and Townsend and Crew are the only two firms that could seemingly go either way. Townsend had high profits last year, but the firm said that was due in large part to a big one-time contingency fee. Thelen’s profits per partner last year, $850,000, weren’t bad, but it would become the Cal Law 25 firm with the lowest PPP to raise associate salaries.
Update: From a commenter: “The partnership at Bingham should be embarrassed; even the media is calling you out.”
Second, some news from DLA Piper in Chicago. Memo, plus some commentary, after the jump.
It’s been all over the comments, so it’s not exactly breaking news. But we have verified it with a source at the firm.
The DLA Piper memo, from your pals Larry, Moe and Curly Frank, Lee and Terry, appears after the jump.
P.S. We intend no disrespect to the work that Frank Burch, Lee Miller, and Terry O’Malley are doing as joint CEOs of DLA Piper. We just think the informality of signing memos as “Frank, Lee and Terry” is a bit forced.
C’mon, guys. You’re the heads of a major international law firm — not three guys we met down at the track.
We now bring you… a pair of non-announcement announcements on the associate pay raise front. They’re from Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and DLA Piper.
As our tipster noted, Pillsbury Winthrop practically “threatens” its associates with a pay raise. Here’s an excerpt from their memo (emphasis added):
We want to take the time to thoughtfully consider your views and take into account your concerns, which we share, regarding the need to stay competitive, together with the implicit work-life balance impact of additional salary increases.
In other words: “Be careful what you wish for; you might just get it.”
The full text of the Pillsbury memo, plus a similar “hold your horses” memo from DLA Piper, after the jump.
We’re all very familiar with the average profits-per-partner figures that are published as part of the AmLaw 100 law firm rankings. But since they’re just averages, they do raise some obvious questions:
– What’s the average take-home pay for a typical Biglaw partner?
– How much do newly minted, junior partners earn, compared to the most senior or most highly compensated partners of a large law firm?
– How much can superstars with enormous books of business rake in?
Information that goes a significant way towards answering such questions appears in this fascinating article, by Andrew Longstreth for the American Lawyer. You should read the whole thing for yourself; it’s socioeconomic voyeurism at its best.
A few excerpts, and some quick thoughts from us, appear after the jump.
We have to step away from the computer for a while. Here’s an open thread about compensation issues to carry us through the weekend.
Three items for possible discussion (which some of you have already started talking about in a prior thread):
1. DLA Piper Singles Out Patent Litigators for Higher Pay [The Recorder]
This follows on the heels of Dechert’s D.C. office announcing higher pay for associates in its financial services practice group. Is differential compensation — a move away from lockstep — a hot new Biglaw trend? 2. The High Price of Escalating Associate Salaries [DC Bar]
From DC bar president James J. Sandman (at right), a partner at Arnold & Porter, writing in the March 2007 issue of Washington Lawyer magazine:
[F]irst-year associate salaries at big firms have gotten to a level where increases are very bad. They are bad for the law firms that pay them, for the associates who receive them, for the clients who foot the bill for them, and for the society we serve.
Sandman takes a swipe at the firm that initiated the latest round of pay raises (Simpson Thacher, cough cough):
I don’t understand what causes a firm be the first to increase the salary of a brand-new lawyer from an already eye-popping $145,000 to $160,000. There is no competitive advantage in doing so. Other firms will surely follow suit, and the firm that led the market will quickly be indistinguishable from the rest of the pack.
To read Sandman’s interesting and provocative argument against the recent raises, click here.
3. Finally, here’s the latest departure from the LIST OF SHAME: Baker & Hostetler.
From a source at the firm:
Baker Hostetler announced raises yesterday effective March 1 (for its New York office only). First-year associates will be making $160K; the managing partner didn’t say how much other classes would be making, but that associates would get letters about next week telling them what their new salary would be.
That leaves, as far as we know, just seven firms on the LIST OF SHAME.
Today was a little more interesting than yesterday. A few announcements were made — or were finally brought to our attention and confirmed, if they were made previously.
After the jump, more information about DLA Piper, Katten Muchin Rosenman, King & Spalding, and Jones Day (Atlanta).
(And, of course, your comments.)
We’ve reached the end of another exciting day in the salary wars.
Okay, exciting may be an overstatement. But it’s obvious that reader interest in this subject remains high.
After the jump, we reprint a pair of non-announcements — or perhaps they could be called “placeholder announcements” — from DLA Piper and Morgan Lewis & Bockius. We also provide space for you to chime in on the latest compensation news, argue over pay differentials in different cities, and bitch about your hours.
To quote Hillary Clinton: “Let the conversation begin!!!”
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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Alston & Bird lost four partners from its Washington office to DLA Piper on Tuesday, according to this report from The Lawyer:
