The Best Bonus Of Them All: Premium Cash Plus Extra Money To Take A Vacation

Enhancing Our 2019 Premium Bonuses

As we announced last year, associates who achieved at least 2,000 client representation hours in performance year 2019 are most likely to be awarded a full merit bonus. In addition, we historically have awarded premium bonuses of up to 10%, plus some additional amounts, for our hardest working associates. But with so many of you working so hard, we’re going even further and raising the premium bonus range up to 35%. These bonuses are awarded by your practice group leader based on both quality of contribution and hard work.

As part of our commitment to wellness, we will repeat the incredibly well-received Unplug On Us vacation bonus of $15,000 for associates and counsel with over 2,400 client representation hours. We encourage you to take this time as soon as possible next year (after consulting with your team and PGL) and to spend the extra bonus on a special experience with friends and family. Like last year, our hardest working career associates, project attorneys and legal assistants will also be eligible to receive the Unplug On Us bonus.

Refreshing Our 2020 Merit Bonus Approach

For 2020, we’re going to change our merit bonus target. To explain this change, we first need to introduce some new vocabulary that we hope makes our program easier to understand and discuss.

Some New Vocabulary

• Beginning next month (but bear with us as we implement this change across all of our systems), we will call all bonus-eligible time “billable.” This includes two categories:

1. Client billable: Client billable, pro bono, Orrick as a client
2. Firm billable: This is time devoted to self and firm investment and may include a combination of shadowing/training, innovation, diversity & inclusion, and/or substantive business development (more on this below).

• We will continue to track all of these types of billable contributions separately, as well as your total hours.

Change In Hours Target

• We will move to a full merit bonus target of 1,850 client billable hours, plus up to 100 firm billable hours, for a total of 1,950 billable hours.

• Depending on your personal career path goals, you can achieve the 100 firm billable hours through a combination of the following self- and firm-investment efforts:

• up to 35 hours of training/shadowing
• up to 50 hours of innovation
• up to 20 hours of D&I
• up to 50 hours of substantive business development
• We believe this change will make us truly competitive in our billable hours policy and give you time to invest in your career, while reinforcing what it means to be a best place to work.

Substantive Business Development

• Like you, we believe that substantive BD contributions are enormously valuable, and we want to enable you to develop these skills and contribute to team efforts. So, as described above, we are adding to the mix up to 50 hours of substantive BD time.
• While each PGL will define the type of BD activity that counts toward this bonus, it will generally include contributions like legal analysis for use in pitches, thought leadership and market research.
• While this means we’re eliminating the separate BD bonus, we’re keeping the Firm Contribution bonus and doubling the amount to $3,000 (for 50 hours of Firm Contribution time).

Making Unplug On Us Part of Our Culture

Unplugging is an important habit throughout the year. This is especially so after intensive months focused on trials and closings. So, whenever you work 250+ billable hours in a month, you’ll be eligible to receive a wellness dollars gift card. After any three months in the year at this pace, the award will increase to $1,000 for the third month. While you can spend it however you like, we hope you’ll invest it in unplugging and wellness, whether that’s a night away, dinner with friends, a fitness activity or a massage.

• We will also offer this program to career associates, project analysts and paralegals, with tailored targets.
• We will determine at the end of 2020 whether to also repeat the year-end vacation bonus.

We also have some changes coming in our time entry policy to ensure all of us maintain good financial management and client relations habits. More details on that coming after Thanksgiving.

Thank you all for your incredible contributions. Our Lawyer Development Team is heading out for the Thanksgiving holiday. We will be available on Monday to answer all of your questions – please email or call us then.

Have a wonderful holiday,

Siobhan and Carolyn