Skadden's Bonuses Contain Extra Good News For Senior Associates

Bonus season has kicked into high gear.

MoneyBonus season is the most wonderful season in Biglaw! It’s the annual reminder to associates that all the billable hours were really worth it.

Earlier this week, Skadden shared its annual monetary appreciation with associates. The firm’s bonus scale matches the one set last month by Baker McKenzie, but contains a little something extra for the most experienced associates. As you can see from the chart below, bonuses for the two most senior classes of associates have a range of bonus money, which *starts* at the market rate and heads north from there.

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Bonuses will be paid on December 16th. According to tipsters at the firm, the “productive hours requirement” for bonuses is 1800 hours and includes unlimited pro bono time and generally up to 150 hours of productive non-billable work.

You can read the full memo on the next page.

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus updates, 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 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 for all of your help!


Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. 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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