Associates
WSJ: Top First-Year Pay Has Hit Ceiling
Posted Feb 15, 2008, 02:44 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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