Last month, the Boston Globe reported on an arbitrator’s finding that Goodwin Procter overcharged a real estate client by more than $540,000. (We mentioned the Globe story here and here.)
Alas, some claim that Goodwin isn’t letting that extra gravy trickle down to its associates….
We’ve had to wait a long time for this announcement. Last year, Cravath kicked off bonus season on November 2nd. This year, bonus news took longer to arrive.
Was it worth the wait? Cravath just announced its bonuses, this afternoon.
So, what are the Cravath year-end bonuses looking like for 2010?
As we said yesterday, there’s still time left in the year for associates to crank out some billable hours to hit their targets. There’s still time to participate in our hours survey, where the early returns suggest that many of you are quite busy.
That’s a good thing, especially if you are at Mayer Brown, New York. No, the firm hasn’t released bonus information yet. In fact, the firm hasn’t even released its 2011 payscale.
But Mayer Brown is telling people how many hours they need to hit in 2010 in order to be eligible for a 2011 raise…
It’s November 1. That’s supposed to mean it’s time for Biglaw bonus season. Here at Above the Law, we’re ready for it. Not only are we expecting emails to flow in about bonuses which should be better than last year (tips@abovethelaw.com), we’re also using our Google Voice account (646-820-TIPS) to accept text messages about bonuses.
We expect bonus season to get rolling in earnest soon. Last year, Cravath announced on November 2nd.
But while we wait for bonuses, it seems we still have some firms that are trying to catch up in regards to base associate compensation. After spending most of the year as salary stragglers, Foley & Lardner seems ready to come back to the pack…
A recent study by economists at UC Berkeley gives employers a nice argument for keeping salaries a secret. Well, luckily for you, I’m not your employer. Therefore I have no qualms about sharing with you Part 2 of the results from our small-firm salary survey.
In your emails following Part 1, many of you asked that I take the practice experience element of the survey and show how it correlates to salary. Good point. I actually had that in mind from the start, but ended up pushing it into my Part 2 draft when I decided to split up the post.
But you don’t care; you just want the numbers. So, with the final caveat that I’m sure I’ll never be able to fully satiate your salary hunger, here’s the latest snack…
Over 650 of you responded to last week’s salary survey. In poring over the results, I learned several lessons:
(1) Don’t make salary questions fill-in-the-blank. It creates a host of problems, including the inadvertent omitting/adding of zeroes, and makes data compilation and analysis unnecessarily difficult.
(2) Do include open-ended “anything else” questions; people write all sorts of amusing things given the chance.
(3) Don’t misspell “where” on question number seven.
So, let’s get to the $64,000 question: How much money are small firm lawyers making?
Biglaw salaries are no secret. You can find numbers all over the internet, including places like oh, I don’t know, Above the Law (not just the home page, but also the Career Center).
But what about information for everyone else? You already know what I made during my time at a small firm, but that doesn’t really help unless you’re looking for a job at my old firm (surprise, they’re not hiring).
Those looking to smaller firm options need information — law students especially. The OCI music has stopped, and there are plenty of people left standing. The good news is that there are other places to sit down. The bad news is that nobody can tell whether sitting in those seats will earn them enough to keep their creditors at bay.
With that and a general interest in the dissemination of information in mind, please take this short survey, so I can begin compiling some hard numbers on small firm salaries. As always, survey responses are kept completely confidential. I’ll sort, analyze and package the results in some kind of eye-pleasing manner.
Please click HERE to take the SURVEY. And please pass the survey along to any of your friends at small firms; the more responses I get, the more accurate and reliable the findings will be.
If you’d like to offer any other salary-related information or clever commentary, or have tips or story suggestions, please email me at Little Richard at gmail dot com. Thanks!
Yes, yes it is. At least that’s what I gather based on the relative volume of commentary I received on the subject since the inception of this column about small law firms. I’ve been avoiding the topic, mostly because salary discussions usually degenerate into little richard-measuring contests but, in addition to the comment wars that spilled out of my posts on hours worked and billable hours, I’m still getting emails like this one:
I’m not sure all this “small law, low pay” stuff is accurate. Certainly, it’s true if we are assuming the small/mid law is in the same market as Big Law, but I’m not sure how often that is the case. Small/mid-sized legal market tends to have a much lower cost of living, which means the magnitude of the paycheck tells you little about its value. How about a post that captures and attempts to balance this concept?
Okay, fine. Now that I’m back from the Canadian wilderness, let’s talk about it…
That was almost four years ago — 1,326 days ago, to be exact (2008 was a leap year). But here we are, in the fourth quarter of 2010, and a new NALP report is telling us top Biglaw salaries in New York have re-established themselves at $160K. Partner profits haven’t generally remained stagnant for four years, at least at certain firms. Law school tuition certainly hasn’t remained stagnant for four years. But the upper end of associate compensation has been stuck in the mud. Back in 2007, I could go to a movie for $10.50. Now it goes all the way up to $11! I’m outraged!
I’m not actually outraged (well, I am about movie prices, but that’s because at $11 you’d think something besides Inception wouldn’t blow). And you won’t find too many associates outraged that their compensation hasn’t kept pace with growing partner profits at some firms. That’s because most associates are recovering from the terror of layoffs and salary deflation. NALP explains it this way:
NALP’s 2010 Associate Salary Survey shows that, although the $160,000 salary for first-year associates still prevails at large firms in a number of markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC, in other markets, such as Boston and San Francisco, the median has dropped back to $145,000, reflecting salaries ranging from $110,000 to $160,000.
Sorry about your tiny pink paycheck, Boston and San Fran.
For the rest of us, let’s take a look at the full salary scale according to NALP’s research…
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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In our coverage last month of top law firm partners to work for, Wilson Sonsini did well. See here and here.
Continue reading “Associate Bonus (and Salary) Watch: Wilson Sonsini”
