“It might be the right result that partners should be making a lot less money and associates should be making a lot more money and not necessarily working harder,” Anglo-American General Counsel Richard Price told Law.com International.
At press time, the in-house leader was suffering from 32 stab wounds in the back. Each appeared to be delivered by an overly pretentious fountain pen bearing the logo of a Biglaw firm.
The London-based legal department leader works with a number of firms including Linklaters, Herbert Smith Freehills, and Macfarlanes… all of whom are weighing the option of asking their IT departments to reinfect firm computers with the Crowdstrike patch until this story blows over.
Price’s call to redistribute law firm wealth arose out of fear surrounding the sustainability of the modern attorney lifestyle.
“What is concerning to me is the expectation that associates are going to have to work much harder because they are earning more money. That potentially undermines the sustainability of the law firm model and the welfare of the associates,” he explained. It’s more expensive over the long-term to rent than own and the law firm model is all about renting associates. Associates could accept less if firms committed to provide steady, lifetime employment working reasonable hours. But if the model depends on grinding a wide base of associates down to a handful who make it to the final boss of a partnership vote, then yeah, the firm is going to have to pay more because associates know they have to make pay off loans and lay away for the future now before they move to a lower-paying gig. It’s a premium the firm pays to have associates they expect to drive away within a few years.
Biglaw has a nasty habit of giving raises with one hand while implying that the associates need to “earn it” with the other. As though someone working 2,500 hours on a stagnant pay scale has some hidden reserve to tap when market pressure triggers a cost-of-living bump.
A few cycles back, Milbank branded its opening move compensation bump as a cost-of-living matter and that’s an approach more firms should adopt rather than treating raises like a cookie on the proverbial noses of young attorneys. Instead, other partners anonymously bitched about how uncouth it was to pay first-years an extra few grand during an economic slowdown while whistling past another year of blockbuster profit per partner numbers.
But like a lot of things out there, this is a transformation that could benefit from some client pressure. Unfortunately, for every Price there’s a former Bank of America GC David Lietch who responded to the first associate salary bump after a decade that featured total cumulative inflation of around 15 percent by informing his firms, “we are aware of no market-driven basis for such an increase and do not expect to bear the costs of the firms’ decisions.” Bank of America, at the time, had just used taxpayer bailout money to fund million-dollar bonuses for its executives.
Maybe there are a whole lot of folks who should be making less while associates make more.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
