Latham Joins The Market For Associate Compensation -- Is This A Good Time To Ask If Staff Will Get The Same Love?
While we celebrate associate raises, perhaps it's time to think about all the other employees that make a Biglaw firm run.
No one really expected Latham to sit out the latest round of associate salary increases. The firm is too big and the momentum to match is too strong at this point. Would Latham have really walked into on-campus interviews paying associates less than their peers? Of course not.
So, as expected, Latham will be matching the market scale all the way up, including summer bonuses for all U.S. associates as well as those in the Middle East, China, and the UK. So this is good news for a lot of people, even if it did take the firm an inordinately long time to get around to announcing it.
The bonuses aren’t as happy. Even though the firm matched the summer bonuses, they’ll be awarded based on end-of-year standards with no provision to “catch up” by billing more down the stretch. UPDATE: Tipsters say that they will be “trued up” which makes sense because it is the emerging market standard.
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In any event, one group that doesn’t necessarily see this as good news are the secretaries and the rest of the staff. Perhaps this is a good time to address just what raises look like to the hardworking people who aren’t getting nearly $200K to make rookie error after rookie error. On the one hand, firm staff aren’t burdened with the same crippling debt as associates, who see a good chunk of their hefty salaries shunted away toward debt servicing every month. On the other hand, cost of living increases don’t just impact lawyers, and the whole staff have seen the real value of their wages sink too. And given that we’ve been justifying this round of raises as all about inflation, there’s not really a good reason to leave the staff out of it.
While this disparity impacts every firm to varying degrees, it’s fitting to raise during a conversation about Latham because the firm recently issued raises for some legal secretaries according to tipsters and the results were… uninspiring. Reports that secretaries secured raises of pennies per hour highlight how extreme the gap is between the lawyers and the rest of the staff when it comes to compensation.
And it only gets worse every time we have another round of raises.
(Check out the memo on the next page…)
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Joe 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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