Everything You Need To Know About The Associate Salary Raises In One Image
Spoiler alert: not every Biglaw firm is going to follow.
The salary bump of 2018 will be markedly different than the 2016 raises. In 2016, everyone and their mother hopped on board with the new pay scale — even firms that probably couldn’t afford it. But salaries had been stagnant for almost a decade, and so, even if it meant tightening the belt, firms felt they really had to move with the market. Now, only two years removed from that market pressure, for a lot of firms, the calculus is different.
Used to be anything tagged with the Biglaw moniker — roughly defined as the Am Law 200 — had pretty robust financial prospects. Firms believed that to ride with the Biglaw crew, you had to offer market salaries to incoming associates. But the 2018 financial picture for law firms really shows a bifurcated market — the rich are getting richer and the second tier of Biglaw firms are struggling to innovate and keep up.
So what does that mean for firms considering keeping up with the Milbankses? It’s a tough question. Those that do decide to move with the market will establish themselves as the very top of the Biglaw world and they’ll be competing for the same, elite associate pool. For the firms whose balance sheets reveal a different story, they’re looking at Milbank as incredulously as LeBron James looked at JR Smith. How could you do this to me indeed?
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Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).
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