Biglaw

Ropes & Gray Bonus Contains A Fun Punishment

I hope you've been putting in your time, on-time, every time.

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Since I took a passing and wholly unnecessary swipe at Ropes & Gray while explaining that Boston is still racist, it feels good to be able to report on Ropes & Gray’s 2017 associate bonuses.

It’s a standard match of the Cravath scale, albeit with a 1,900 billable hours requirement. Ropes counts qualified pro-bono hours towards the requirement. The bonuses are being paid this Friday in case you have any last minute Christmas shopping to do. Yada, yada, ho-hum.

Let’s get to the fun part. From the bonus memo:

Timely diaries are critical to our business. They enable us to bill clients promptly at the end of each month, and are essential to monitoring and managing alternative fee arrangements. For these reasons, adhering to our diary standards is absolutely crucial. As previously announced, lawyers violating our diary standards have received an automatic bonus reduction.

Ooh, I like this. Putting in your time may seem like a pain-in-the-ass, clerical duty that is beneath your average associate. It’s also how the firm MAKES MONEY. Small and solo practitioners know how important it is to bill timely and accurately. They do not have this problem. It’s only in Biglaw where associates feel like time keeping is an administrative task as opposed to THE REASON THEY’RE ALL THERE.

Docking people a bit off their bonus seems like an excellent way to make this point. Sometimes it’s pretty hard to judge whether your 1,900 hours were more important to the firm than her 1,900 hours. But if her hours were in on time and yours were put in months in arrears, guess what, her hours were more valuable to the firm.

I hope more firms do this. And I say that as a person who would absolutely have been docked because doing routine clerical work is something I always fail at. Docking the bonus is an appropriate punishment for the crime.

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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