If you compensate your partners in an ‘eat what you kill’ manner, you’re going to create a very different firm than if you compensate in an lockstep manner, where everyone has a culture of collaboration, working together. The world now is trending much more toward ‘eat what you kill’ and that is a huge problem.
In our system, we send a memo out every fall to all our partners asking them to write a 10-page memo outlining their contribution to the firm. Our compensation is pretty lockstep, everyone knows what everyone else makes.
— Brad Karp, chairman of Paul Weiss, describing the way compensation at large law firms has changed over the years, during a breakout session at Harvard Law’s Center on the Legal Profession conference on Professionalism in the 21st Century.
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