Midsize Firms / Regional Firms

The Salary Wars Ain't Over Yet: This Firm Is Paying First-Year Associates $230K

And more senior associates are going to be paid an astonishing amount.

By  
on

Choo-choo! All aboard the M&R money train!

It may be October, but the associate raise train is still chug-chug-chugging along, and it just pulled into a new station where a firm isn’t just making it rain on associates, it’s making it pour.

The Davis Polk salary scale — which ranges from $202,500 for first-year associates to $365,000 for eighth-year associates — is nice, but what if we told you there’s a firm where first-years could be making up to $230,000 and more senior associates could be taking home up to $450,000? In this hot market, it seems like the recipe for a lateral move.

Michelman & Robinson, a Los Angeles-based midsize firm that previously paid associates on the Cravath scale, just announced that it would be boosting salaries by quite a bit. “It’s our mission to have associates view our firm not as just an arbitrary place to practice law, but as a home where careers are built and passions realized,” said Sanford Michelman, M&R’s chairman and co-founder. “At the same time, we want our younger lawyers to feel as appreciated as they truly are, which is why we have significantly adjusted our compensation scale upward, making M&R associates among the highest paid in the legal industry beginning in 2022.”

The firm’s pay structure is unique in that it’s based on levels, not years. As Michelman explains, this can be quite profitable for associates:

“Our associates are reviewed each year, and based on those reviews, they are placed in levels appropriate to their individual skillsets. These levels, which aren’t necessarily in lockstep with an associate’s years in practice, are aligned with a set of specifically stated objective standards we have in place. At the end of the day, what this means is that a reviewing partner can recommend that—say—a third-year associate be characterized as a level five attorney given his or her capabilities. In such a case, that third-year will be compensated much more generously than his or her Big Law peers practicing the same number of years. Our associates believe this to be a very exciting possibility.”

A higher salary scale isn’t all that M&R is offering to associates. The firm has a 1,920 hour annual billable target, not a requirement, and has offered all sorts of wellness perks throughout the pandemic. On top of all that, according to Lara Shortz, the firm’s recruiting partner, the firm will soon launch a student debt refinancing program and a first-time mortgage initiative for associates.

Sponsored

Congratulations to everyone at Michelman & Robinson!

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] Matches”). 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.

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Sponsored

Bonus Time

Enter your email address to sign up for ATL's Bonus & Salary Increase Alerts.

Topics

, , , ,