Associates
WSJ: Top First-Year Pay Has Hit Ceiling
Posted Feb 15, 2008 2:44 PM CST
By Martha Neil
Despite big profits for 2007 recently reportedly by a number of major U.S.-based law firms, associates shouldn't expect pay increases anytime soon.
At least for now, salaries for the nation's highest-paid first-year associates are likely to stay at $160,000 because of the struggling economy, reports the Wall Street Journal Law Blog. In calls to major U.S.-based law firms, it apparently didn't find any that are planning to up the ante.
"Work (especially the transactional type) is down at a lot of law firms, and the short-term horizon looks pretty grim," Law Blog reports, quoting one unnamed big-firm managing partner as saying that “2008 is shaping up to be really tough."
Among the firms with which Law Blog checked: Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, whose equity partners earned an average of $2.53 million last year.
Those firms with a PEP of $2.4 million or more are among the 10 most profitable, as another ABAJournal.com post discusses.
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Comments
OH PLEASE!
Feb 17, 2008 11:56 PM CST
Profits Per Partner are continuing to skyrocket, and with the de-equitization of many older partners and with offsourcing and the drastic increase in the utilization of temp lawyers, don’t tell me that “times are tough”!
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GIVE ME A BREAK
Feb 23, 2008 12:48 AM CST
Okay… how about an article about the vast majority of graduates that can’t find jobs? Or are forced to take jobs at the same starting salaries of undergrads? Or forced to take these document review career killing jobs to just get to by? I’m tired of these stories about the very few that get the high paid entry level jobs!!!!! They make a lot of money! We get the point!
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Hah!
Feb 23, 2008 6:53 AM CST
Boo hoo. Those kids at Skadden will be crying themselves to sleep on their 1000 count pillow cases. GMAB, take heart, there is a career out there for you if you are smart and diligent; its just that you will have to hack it out of the wilderness rather than have it handed to you like these whiteshoe folks. Find a niche and work the dog out of it! In the end you will be happier and just as financially successful.
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Lucky???
Feb 23, 2008 9:09 AM CST
I think its incorrect to say that the high paying jobs are “handed to the whiteshoe folks.” I earned one of these big firm offers, and I come from a small town Oklahoma blue collar family. Someone once said “luck is where preparation meets opportunity.” (I think it was Thomas Jefferson) I worked my butt off to develop my resume and get high grades…not to mention the networking while in law school. I’m not saying that first year lawyers are really worth $160k per year, but i’m not going to apologize for succeeding in a competitive environment. I understand that these jobs go to a minority of law students, and I appreciate the fact that people want to see articles on issues that affect the majority, but i’m tired of people assuming that my success was handed to me for free. I do feel lucky to have the opporunity, but my luck was truly the meeting of preparation and opportunity. I worked hard and earned it.
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Mark Pitchford
Feb 23, 2008 9:13 AM CST
How about something useful to average associate life like:
tips for making yourself indispensible
tips for being more profitable
tips for managing your own practice
real world methods for generating work
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Jonathan Edwards
Feb 23, 2008 10:17 AM CST
As for Mark (#5) - tips for the average joe would be useful. there are plenty of blogs out there, many easily accessible from this site. There is plenty of information available, it would be nice if that was headlined occasionally. I would add, as I have in previous weeks, that there are many places in America that need good attorneys, so don’t ignore the small towns in the midwest or even (dare I say it) Peoples Republik of Kalifornia. I wouldn’t live there (having grown up north of the PRK) but I know there is much more to the place than the big cities. Some of it would even be really nice if they would just break off from the central government. Just think - small town attorney, where everybody knows your name.
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elmo
Feb 23, 2008 11:53 AM CST
Lucky??? I don’t fault you for your success. Obviously we all know how competitive the legal field is and there is no shame in making a good living. But you are kidding yourself if you don’t recognize that the huge discrepancy in starting salaries has an overall negative effect on the profession. My law school was traditionally a public interest based program-lots of students headed to the public sector or non-profit areas. No more. High tuition and the promise of bloated salaries are leading to a shift in the curriculum. This means less opportunities and variety in employment- not more. In addition, public perception is everything. The public isn’t about to support lowering or capping tuition for public law schools- let alone insisting on better salaries for public-sector attorneys when they read about first year associates making that kind of money. They think we’re all overpaid. The bottom line is that a two tier system isn’t good for any profession.
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Steven J
Feb 23, 2008 12:09 PM CST
Elmo, I think your post is spot on.
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fung ku
Feb 24, 2008 10:00 AM CST
#5 is right on. There is way to much focus on pay. The truth is that you can make a lot of money doing anything ( including law or making sandwiches) if you are enterprising enough. People from foreign countries come here and think it is awesome because there is always opportunity. It’s fairly clear that law schools manipulate their numbers on salary and placement. It’s also fairly clear that more attorneys are produced per year than the market requires. The bottom line is we can’t all expect to graduate law school and be earning this $160k the next day…those who are angry they’re not need to let go and start thinking about another option. I guarantee there are at least 99 other ways to make this amount and it doesn’t require a degree from Harvard.
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Scott
Feb 25, 2008 6:59 AM CST
Why is it that lawyers who make a PROFIT of $2.53 million, or even $1.00 million are not investigated, and censured, by the Courts in which they are licensed, for egregious overcharging?
CLEARLY no lawyer is worth $2.53, or even $1.00 million based upon his own ability to work 2000 hours a year. By the same token, CLEARLY, if a lawyer is taking PROFITS in excess of $1.00 million from his firm, he or she MUST be overcharging for his the work of the other, non-equity, lawyers in his firm.
It is impossible to generate those kinds of profits based upon ‘economies of scale’. These $1.00 million dollar plus law firms (and even $1.00 million is excessive) are patently, obviously, and unarguably, overcharging their clients. The Courts who allow this farce to continue are part of this overcharging and are not doing their lawful duty to prevent this kind of abuse.
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UrbanCowboy
Feb 25, 2008 8:48 AM CST
As to #10, when you get to that level its all business. Equity partners may not bill close to 2000 hrs., but some where along the way the reeled in a big client that generates a lot of work. So, I don’t fault them for that..athough, in the same vein as the majority of the postings…the lower end of the salary range is not moving in lock-step with top end (actually it’s not moving at all). In an article I read this past year (one of the major publications), it demonstrated how the average starting legal salary has actually declined over the last 20 years. Look, I have good friends who are exactly like #4 and I don’t begrudge them anything. I just wish the profession would recognize and respond to the fact that new, licensed attorneys, who invested a hell of a lot of time and money in the profession, are living paycheck to paycheck because of the student debt they must carry. I don’t think I’ll be practicing law, in the traditional sense, for long; I can’t afford to.
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What?
Feb 27, 2008 8:21 AM CST
The continued focus on lawyer salaries feeds the negative stereotype about our profession: that we are just out there to make a buck, possibly at the expense of our own clients. The fact that the ABA, which purportedly represents the entire profession (although you’d never guess that based on their amicus filings lately) is publishing this information just throws gasoline on the fire, and shows it is more tuned to big firm lawyers than the rest. We (and it) should focus on what lawyers are doing to advance our society, not how many millions of dollars a few of us are making (by the way, I am not one of them). I don’t think many of us went to law school just so we could get rich, but so we could make a difference. The Journal should be showing more of this, and less of the perpetual salary one-upsmanship.
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