Salaries

Career Center: Top 4 Reasons to Be Thankful for Your Biglaw Job This Thanksgiving

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With Thanksgiving just a week away, turkey may already be on your mind. But hopefully so are family, friends, and a time to reflect on what you are thankful for this year. If you’re having trouble with that last part, the Career Center has put together a list of the top 4 reasons Biglaw associates can be thankful for their jobs this holiday season.

1. Next up, bonus season. Most of you have actually been feeling quite optimistic that bonuses will be bigger than last year’s combined year-end bonus plus spring bonus. Of course, we’ll have to wait until Cravath makes the first move to see whether there’s any truth to those predictions, but at least you know there will be bonuses to be had.

So what else made the list?

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Morning Docket: 08.29.11

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* You call that a raise? After 12 years of stagnant salaries for state judges, New York’s Commission on Judicial Compensation sure has a funny way of “correcting injustice.” [New York Times]

* Hope you had some D.C. firms on your bid list for OCI, because they seem to be on a hiring spree. Is there room for all of these newbies? [Washington Post]

* Maybe if we let Jacoby & Meyers get some non-lawyer investors, they could afford better commercials. Come on, even the ABA thinks the law should be run like a business. [New York Law Journal]

* O’Melveny wants to give new parents advice on transitioning back to work. After losing talent earlier this year, perhaps the firm could have used some transition advice itself? [The Careerist]

* My parents “ruined my life” a lot when I was a teenager, but I never sued over it. Unfortunately for these plaintiffs, being a snotty little brat isn’t a valid cause of action in Illinois. [Chicago Tribune]

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How Can a Lawyer ‘Settle’ for the Only Job He Can Get?

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I’ve always wondered what kind of salary contract lawyers make these days. Okay, not really, I kind of already know, because a lot of my friends are contract lawyers. But for those of you who aren’t familiar with the wonderful world of contract lawyering, the Wall Street Journal had an interesting article yesterday, by Vanessa O’Connell, on the trials and tribulations of these lawyers-for-hire.

The Journal editors decided to give the piece a cutesy title by using a play on words: “Lawyers settle… for temp jobs.” Lawyers are supposed to be settling cases, and now they’re settling for temporary jobs. Oh, that’s so very witty.

What the WSJ folks might not have realized is that when you’re an unemployed new lawyer in this kind of economy, or even if you’re an older one, you don’t really have the option of “settling.” It’s depressing, but you kind of just accept the fact that this is the hand that you’ve been dealt.

But maybe there is a bright side to this situation after all. Maybe these contract attorneys are making serious bank in these temporary positions….

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Nationwide Pay Raise Watch: West Coast Action

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We recently reported on Wilson Sonsini restoring associate base salaries to pre-recession levels. Wilson Sonsini associates in five major offices — New York, Palo Alto, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. — are now paid on what might be called the New York market scale or the $160K scale (a scale I’ve committed to memory: 160/170/185/210/230/265).

In our story, we quoted a WSGR associate who viewed the firm’s raise as a response to salary hikes by two Silicon Valley peer firms, Cooley and Gunderson Dettmer. At the time of our story, however, Cooley and Gunderson had not raised SV associate salaries to NYC market levels.

UPDATE: To be precise, Cooley had announced a raise at the time of the WSGR memo, but the raise had not yet taken effect. Gunderson did not announce until yesterday.

Let’s learn more….

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Non-Sequiturs: 03.22.11

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When in need of a pic of a T.V. cheerleader, am I right to go with Minka Kelly over Hayden Panettiere? Can we get some kind of ruling on this?

* Is it possible that in South Dakota you have to go through a shorter waiting period to buy a gun and shoot someone who is already alive than you have to go through in order to have an abortion? Could somebody check on that? [MSNBC]

* Did you see this chart showing that law professors make more than all other professors at the college level? I think I forgot to mention it because when my brain sees such horrible atrocities it enacts self-defense protocols and deletes the knowledge from my… Did you see this chart showing that law professors… [Chronicle of Higher Education]

* Same-sex couple gets deportation put on hold to pursue marriage-based immigration case. I think we’re all safer when Homeland Security isn’t run by Leviticus. [Stop the Deportations]

* If cheerleading were a real sport, this lawsuit might be really interesting. [Jezebel]

* If you think our coolest law firm bracket is dorky (don’t forget, voting ends tonight at midnight), you should check out what the bankruptcy people at Weil are up to. [Bankruptcy Blog]

* Once you get off the legal treadmill, do you ever have the urge to go back? “… That’s pride f**king with you. F**k pride.” [Law and More]

* If you think about it, pay raises should really come in the spring, when everything is new and happy, instead of the middle of winter, when everything is cold and dead. [What About Clients?]

* An obituary for Warren Christopher, former O’Melveny partner (and secretary of state, too). [Huffington Post]

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Associate Salary Watch: Big (and Good) News from Winston & Strawn

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Well that didn’t take long, did it? On Tuesday afternoon, we wrote about associates at Winston & Strawn who were upset over the lack of news on seniority-based salary bumps. Since we’re well into a new year, associates at top law firms should be getting raises, with first-years becoming second-years ($160K to $170K), second-years becoming third-years ($170K to $185), etc. But the Winston tipsters hadn’t heard anything — even though historically they’ve received pay raise news in early February, and now it’s mid-March.

Today, however, the Winston associates received some good news — very good news, in fact. “Salary memos went out today,” one Winston source reported. “The bottom line is that those who were not at market rate now are. They’ve abandoned the ‘merits-based’ system and have gone back to lockstep.”

Wow. Is merit-based compensation becoming a casualty of the economic recovery? Back when merit-based systems were all the rage, we created a category on ATL called Killing Lockstep. Perhaps now it’s time to create ones called Killing Killing Lockstep, or Lockstep Resurrected?

Regardless of whether or not this becomes a trend throughout Biglaw, Winston associates are happy — and grateful….

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Associate Bonus Watch: Winston & Strawn
(And an additional issue about base salaries.)

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As we’ve explained before, we want to hear about your law firm’s bonus news, even if it’s old. As long as we haven’t written it up yet, please consider it fair game. (Use our site search box in the upper-right-hand corner, or scroll through our Associate Bonus Watch archives, to see which announcements we’ve already covered.)

One firm that announced bonuses many moons ago: Winston & Strawn. This was well before the spring bonus phenomenon took hold, so the Cravath 2010 year-end bonuses were still the benchmark.

Find out what Winston did — and learn about an additional issue that is bugging some Winston associates (and maybe associates at other firms, too)….

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(And an additional issue about base salaries.)“

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Associate Bonus (and Salary) Watch: Fish & Richardson

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A day without bonus news is a day without sunshine. We wouldn’t let this Monday pass without giving you some new compensation information to wrap your heads around.

Today’s bonus news comes from the prominent intellectual-property firm of Fish & Richardson. Fish’s approach to associate compensation is closely watched by other IP shops, so we expect this announcement to be of interest to many of you.

IP lawyers like numbers, right? So let’s look at the FR memo, which includes lots of ‘em — tables for bonuses, in 2010 and 2009 (for comparison purposes), and also a table of 2011 base salaries….

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Salary Information of Law School Deans (Please, No Digital Stoning)

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What your law school dean does when alone at the office.

I, for one, do not think that a person’s salary can or should be used as a proxy for determining whether or not that person is committed to any particular cause. I don’t think people who fight for the poor need be poor themselves. I don’t think people who work for the state should be relegated to the kind of salaries that will convince the best and brightest to never work for the state. I just don’t think a person’s salary is all that indicative of a person’s commitment to doing the right thing.

That said, it doesn’t look good to be putting other people in financial distress while you enjoy a large paycheck, especially when you are in a position of public trust. When you are in a leadership position at a public university, you are expected to be looking out for your students, not just your own bank account.

The salaries of deans from public law schools don’t prove that these people are placing themselves above the needs of their students. They don’t really reflect anything — other than the going rate for a law school dean, in a competitive market for talent. But man, they don’t look good. In fairness, they look awful, given that we’re living in a world where many of these deans are raising tuition on students who for the most part won’t even be able to dream of making the kind of money these deans pull down.

So take a look, but try to remember that if you were in the deans’ shoes, you’d act no differently. You’d take every penny that was offered to you…

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A Small Firm Salary Survey: The Results (Part 2)

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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…

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