Biglaw

Guess Which Biglaw Firm That's NOT In The Top 25 Just Matched While So Many Others Twiddle Their Thumbs

The top of the Am Law 100 revenue rankings feature a bevy of firms that haven't matched. And the bottom of that features one that has.

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Now comes Kramer Levin.

Managing partner Paul S. Pearlman just informed U.S. associates — the firm has offices in New York and Silicon Valley — that they would be receiving a raise to match the Biglaw market effective July 1. Summer associates aren’t included in this memo, but presumably they’re getting a separate communique.

The firm is fully matching the market numbers for associates and paying out the summer bonuses that have become standard. Kramer is offering a couple of avenues to earn the summer bonus — either meeting the firm’s billables requirement on an annualized basis for the first six months of the year, or meeting the billables requirement for the year dated July 1, 2017 through June 30, 2018. That’s more fair than some firms, who have offered to prorate the billables requirement for the first six months, leaving attorneys who bill more in Q3 and Q4 out in the cold.

Back in 2016, Kramer Levin provided a salary scale that went beyond the top class (then the class of 2007), offering $5000/year raises for associates beyond that threshold. It looks like the firm has abandoned that approach with this set of raises, opting instead to offer every associate beyond the class of 2010 $10K more than the top of the Cravath scale. That said, $350K is still more than any of those attorneys were getting under the old scale, so they can’t really complain.

Wow. It’s sooooo amazing that Kramer Levin, a firm sitting at 93rd on the Am Law 100 gross revenue ranking, can offer up raises when firms like Latham at 2nd can’t bring themselves to announce. Or that Reed Smith at 25th claims they can’t afford. Really amazing.

(Full memo on the next page, which you probably assumed if you’ve ever read one of these posts before.)

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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