Associates, did you click on this article hoping for some firm to beat the Cravath bonus scale? Well, temper your greed — and think about your colleagues on the staff side.
Ever since Biglaw bonus season started, we’ve received a slew of emails from law firm support staff wondering what their fate may be as the Benjamins continue to rain down upon associates. After all, it takes an army for law firms this large to run, and the behind-the-scenes battalions of paralegals, secretaries, administrative assistants, and all other support staff members deserve their due, too.
After an extremely successful year, one of the most prestigious firms in the country came to the conclusion that its support staff — a class defined broadly to include all personnel from human resources, business development, paralegals, secretaries, etc. — deserved a little bit more, and decided to issue special bonuses to them of one week’s pay, on top of any discretionary year-end bonuses they were already due to receive.
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Congratulations to Weil Gotshal & Manges for setting the bar for how Biglaw firms ought to treat their administrative staff members.
Here’s the memo Weil’s administrative staff members received from the management committee, later confirmed by David Strumeyer, the firm’s executive director:
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Please note that special bonuses for Weil’s staff members will be paid on December 23, 2016, while year-end bonuses for associates will be paid on January 31, 2017.
That’s our take on Weil Gotshal’s special bonuses for staff. If you’re a staff member at the firm, what do you think? Feel free to let us know how you feel by email, by text message (646-820-8477), or by tweet (@ATLblog). A fun or insightful response — we’ll keep you anonymous — could find its way into an update to this story.
What is your firm doing in terms of staff bonuses this holiday season? Is it paying out two-figure, three-figure, or four-figure bonuses? Please let us know.
As a little reminder, we love covering the Biglaw bonus season, but we need your help. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”). We always keep our sources on bonus stories anonymous. There’s no need to send the memo using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. Please be sure to include the memo as proof; we like to post complete bonus memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file. Thanks for your help.
Don’t forget, if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please enter your email address in the box below. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Cheers to a happy bonus season, everyone!
Staci Zaretsky is an editor at Above the Law. She’d love to hear from you, so feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.