When Your Firm Is This Profitable, You Really Have To Raise Associate Salaries

Congratulations to the associates benefiting from the firm's profitability.

There are so many fun aspects of the great associate salary hike of 2018. The warring and coming over the top that led to the market coalescing around the Milbank/Simpson/Cravath scale was enjoyable to watch over the past 10 days, but now a slower developing — but no less interesting — story is playing out.

There’s been a lot of talk surrounding this year’s salary raise that we’ll see a clear line drawn between the haves and have-nots of the Biglaw world. Though the 2016 salary bump, spearheaded by Cravath, led to near universal adoption of a new market scale, there’s a lot more financial pressure on the bottom half of the Am Law 200 today. For this set of raises, many are predicting firms will be a lot more careful before they get on board, and it may even lead to a bifurcated market.

But as you might imagine, the eighth most profitable law firm in the country, Cahill Gordon & Reindel, counts itself squarely within the “haves.” The firm just announced they were matching the new market base compensation scale as well as the special bonus scale (and yes, firms ranked 1-7 in profitability according to the most recent Am Law 100 data have already raised salaries).

It may take some time to figure out the break of firms that refuse to move to the new salary scale, but we’ll be watching.

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Raises Salaries”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we’ll also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. 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. Thanks!

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(Read the full memo from the firm on the next page.)


headshotKathryn 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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