Author: TSA Press

We just pay as we go. This year we are having a record year, so our bonuses are in record territory. It makes all those other dumb bonuses look like crap.

— William Reid IV, founding partner of Austin-based trial boutique Reid Collins & Tsai, commenting on the enormous bonuses the firm has already paid out to both associates and junior partners. Thus far, junior associates (with one to three years of experience) have been paid $85,000 to $95,000 in bonuses, senior associates (with four to five years of experience) have been paid $85,000 to $102,500 in bonuses, and salaried, nonequity junior partners (with six to 10 years of experience) have been paid $100,000 to $312,500 in bonuses. “I’m hoping to convey out there that you don’t have to go to a big firm to make money,” said Reid, who expects to pay out another round of bonuses before 2019 is over.

Staci 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.

Since we broke the news of the market bonus scale for associates at large law firms in the United States — a trend that was started by Milbank on Thursday, November 7, 2019, and finally followed by Cravath on Monday, November 11, 2019 — many firms have quickly fallen in line and matched the scale. It’s still quite early in bonus season, so we’ve yet to hear from firms offering statements on why they’ve failed to match the market, and dozens upon dozens of firms have remained completely silent thus far.

As usual, we are compiling a table of all the firms that have already matched the new bonus scale, the markets where those bonus matches were made, the minimum hours required to receive those bonuses (if available), and the date those bonuses will be paid. Today, we unveil that table for your viewing pleasure. We will be updating this table on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times, as news on bonuses is announced. If you see any information here that is incorrect or needs clarification, let us know.

Help us help you now (and if/when you decide to make a lateral move in the future). Let us know what your firm’s minimum billable hours targets are for bonus eligibility and when your firm will pay those bonuses. You generally must remain at your firm until the payout date to receive them, as stated in most memos, which could make it all the more difficult for you to leave your place of employment.

As a little reminder, we love covering the Biglaw bonus season, but we need your help. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”). We always keep our sources on bonus stories anonymous. There’s no need to send the memo using your firm email account; your personal email account is fine. Please be sure to include the memo as proof; we like to post complete bonus memos as a service to our readers. You can take a photo of the memo and attach as a picture if you are worried about metadata in a PDF or Word file.

Don’t forget, if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please enter your email address in the box below. 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. Cheers to a happy bonus season, everyone!

Staci 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.

One of the biggest shocks I experienced as a young IP associate came after a few months as a junior associate in the New York office of a Biglaw firm. Things were busy, as I found myself being assigned to a number of cases that were in various stages of development within the IP group. Hard work and long hours were expected, so there was nothing surprising about my workload. What was shocking to my naive young legal practitioner mind, however, was that none of the cases I was working on were in New York! The shock quickly wore off as I learned that this was simply the nature of IP practice, which involves working in the main with federal laws and courts. As my career has progressed, many New York-based cases have also come along, even as the majority of my caseload nearly always seems to be centered outside of my home state. In fact, over time, the national (and increasingly international) nature of my practice has been a source of great satisfaction, both in terms of developing relationships with lawyers around the country and with getting to practice before different courts as well. 

One thing patent litigators quickly learn is that there is a great distribution of litigation talent nationwide. While the patent bar — especially the segment that handles high-stakes cases — may seem small, there is no doubt that there is a plethora of talent in every major IP locale. Moreover, technological advances and a burgeoning entrepreneurial spirit have led many former Biglaw patent litigators to open their own shops, secure in the knowledge that they can compete with their former colleagues for business and results. As a small firm owner myself, I particularly enjoy the opportunity to interact with others who have made a similar leap. Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Hilgers, a former Fifth Circuit law clerk and Fish & Richardson attorney, who also happens to be serving as a state senator for Nebraska’s District 21, serving in the nation’s only nonpartisan legislature. 

The political gig is a part-time one, as Mike is busy running the law firm he co-founded, Hilgers Graben PLLC, out of his office in Lincoln, Nebraska. With 30+ lawyers in multiple states, Mike has built Hilgers Graben into a very viable option for sophisticated clients looking for cost-effective, but still top-drawer, representation in litigation matters. What is striking about how Mike and his colleagues position their firm is how they have turned their unique geographic setup into a marketing tool, by what Mike calls “Geo-Arbitrage” —  clients can enjoy Biglaw-caliber legal representation at a fraction of the cost due to the firm’s main location in Nebraska instead of a major metropolis. (Their Lincoln headquarters is stocked with alums of law schools like University of Chicago, Harvard, and Stanford.) In my view, this approach provides a great example of a firm approaching marketing from the position of playing to its strengths, while recognizing — but also answering — potential client concerns about the firm’s resources and ability to compete with Biglaw alternatives. 

Overall, I found Mike’s story a very interesting one, and he graciously agreed to a written interview for this audience. As usual, I have added some brief commentary to the answers below and in next week’s second installment, but have otherwise presented Mike’s answers as he provided them.

1) You were local counsel in a very large ($100M+ damages claim) patent case in Nebraska recently. While that role sometimes gets short-shrift, you ended up having a key role throughout, including at trial. What did that experience teach you?

MH: Be grateful to those who give you opportunities and look to pay it forward. Opportunities in big trials do not come around very often, and the major pieces of the case, from picking the jury, to openings, key crosses, and closing, often go to the most senior lawyers on the lead trial team. My co-counsel and team are as good as it gets and they gave me the opportunity to play a meaningful role in a big case — roles they could have saved for themselves. I’ll forever be grateful for the opportunity and I am always looking to pay that forward in other cases.

Having local expertise is important, but less so than you might think or might have been true in years past. It is possible to have a nationwide federal court practice even if you’re not located in that jurisdiction. That is especially true with patent litigation. With the Federal Circuit hearing nationwide appeals on patent cases, you have one court setting standards nationwide, and with top patent venues adopting similar model patent rules, the process is largely familiar across districts. Trials, hearings, and Markman typically happen with enough advance notice that you can travel for the hearing. That isn’t meant to minimize the importance of knowing the judges, or the juries, and having a local presence (and our Texas presence is important for cases in the Eastern District), but it is not always necessary to be personally located in the district to have a successful practice there.

GK: Mike’s message about gratitude and paying things forward should resonate with each of us. The impetus is on us as lawyers to demonstrate gratitude to those who have entrusted us with opportunities, while never shying away from affording similar opportunities to those we work with or supervise. Likewise, Mike’s point about the basic contours of patent litigation being similar nationwide resonates with me, especially in light of the experiences I referenced at the beginning of this column. 

Next week, we will conclude our interview with Mike, focusing his experience as a Biglaw refugee running a law firm from the heartland.

Please feel free to send comments or questions to me at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or via Twitter: @gkroub. Any topic suggestions or thoughts are most welcome.

Gaston Kroub lives in Brooklyn and is a founding partner of Kroub, Silbersher & Kolmykov PLLC, an intellectual property litigation boutique, and Markman Advisors LLC, a leading consultancy on patent issues for the investment community. Gaston’s practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and related counseling, with a strong focus on patent matters. You can reach him at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or follow him on Twitter: @gkroub.

Kinney Recruiting has been contacted by a leading litigation boutique in New York, NY, to conduct a search for a mid-level litigation associate.  The ideal candidate will have two (2) to five (5) years of litigation experience at a large firm on matters such as breach of contract actions, employment litigation, white collar defense and investigations, and other complex commercial litigation.  Candidates must have a federal clerkship or a New York appellate clerkship (New York Appellate Division or New York Court of Appeals).  Exceptional academic achievement at a nationally-recognized U.S. law school and admission to the New York bar are required.

To be considered, please apply through this posting or submit your resume to jobs@kinneyrecruiting.com.

We told you that once Milbank set the scale (last week) and Cravath confirmed it (yesterday) that the top of the Biglaw pile would be falling all over themselves to prove that they’re nimbly able to match the compensation scale.

So the question we’ll be answering over the next few weeks, is which firms are able to match? Now a Magic Circle firm — Clifford Chance — has answered in the affirmative. Earlier today, the firm announced the following bonuses for all U.S. associates:

The bonuses are scheduled to be paid on January 15th.

Remember, 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 all 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 your help!

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. 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).

Corporate legal departments are looking beyond the largest firms for outside counsel. The reasons for this trend are various, and include the widespread unbundling of legal work as well as the transformation of the in-house/law firm relationship, with increasing expectations of collaboration and transparency. What is indisputable is that smaller and mid-sized practices have unprecedented opportunities to compete for the most sophisticated and lucrative work.

The key to seizing this opportunity is the strategic leveraging of technologies, including:

• Advanced security measures;
• The cloud;
• Advanced file-type support; and
• Automation

Join us on November 21st at 1 p.m. ET for a free webinar hosted by Jared Correia, who will be joined by Morgan Churma from Scharf Banks, and AJ Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Everlaw. Our expert panel will share insights and case studies on how your smaller firm can level the playing field with technology in today’s fiercely competitive market.

Normally associate bonus season is a rapid-fire event with firms falling all over themselves to follow the first announcer within the hours and days that follow. But when Milbank set the annual bonus schedule last Thursday, an eerie lull descended over the market as everyone looked around wondering what would happen next.

Cravath usually sets the tone and everyone follows suit. But whenever another firm tries to move first, Biglaw leaders act like a killer robot asked to ponder a paradox about human love and steam shoots from their ears as they try to figure out what to do without Cravath’s seal of approval.

Thursday passed without any follow on. Then Friday. Then the holiday came and everyone wondered if we’d ever hear of another firm matching. Finally, Cravath decided to match Milbank and now the sluice gates on Flood Control Dam #3 are fully opened.

This brings us to the news that Fried Frank has decided to match the Milbank scale in its New York, Washington, and London offices. The scale, for those who’ve forgotten since the last post roughly 20 minutes ago is…

Class of 2019 – $15,000 (pro-rated)
Class of 2018 – $15,000
Class of 2017 – $25,000
Class of 2016 – $50,000
Class of 2015 – $65,000
Class of 2014 – $80,000
Class of 2013 – $90,000
Class of 2012 – $100,000
Class of 2011 and senior – $100,000

There’s an added perk for Fried Frank associates, with the firm offering a premium of 15-30 percent over the designated class amount for outstanding performance. Special counsel and other attorneys will receive “individual” bonuses.

Bonuses will be paid out on or before December 31. Full memo available on the next page.

Please help us help you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). 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, 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.

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.

Now that Cravath has settled into its apparent new role as a market follower, other firms have decided to dutifully fall in line with Milbank’s incredibly early year-end bonus announcement.

Once again, commercial litigation boutique Holwell Shuster & Goldberg — the firm founded by Judge Richard Holwell (formerly of the Southern District of New York) and his former White & Case colleagues Mike Shuster, Dan Goldberg, and Dorit Ungar Black — has taken the lead on compensation and joined Milbank in announcing bonuses, ahead of almost all the other Biglaw firms that will match the market in the days and weeks to come.

Here’s a kind note to associates that was included in the firm’s bonus memo:

2019 was another great year for the firm as we continued to deliver top notch legal services to our clients, achieve impressive victories on their behalf and add remarkably talented attorneys to our bench. You are all a big part of what makes the firm’s successes possible and why HSG is a very special place to practice law.

Read the full bonus memo on the next page. Money will land in associates’ bank accounts on or before December 31.

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!

Staci 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.

Alright, let’s do this one last time.

If that sentence sounds familiar, it might be because it’s the device used in Into The Spiderverse every time the film introduces another alternate dimension version of Spiderman, and the joke is that it’s “one last time” over and over and over again. The precise details always change, but in broad strokes, someone is always bitten by a radioactive spider (technically Peter Porker was a spider bitten by a radioactive pig, but I digress) and becomes a superhero.

That’s a decent analogy for the phenomenon of law schools dropping the n-word every few months. The precise details always change, but in broad strokes, someone is always invited to discuss the First Amendment and hate speech and feels the need to hurl out racial slurs lest the black students in the room not fully understand the gravity of hate speech.

And every time this happens, it’s heralded as some kind of one-off outlier. Until we do it again a few months later… one last time.

This time it was Caitlin Sewell, who was assistant general counsel at the University of North Texas, until an invitation to speak at an event on “understanding of civil discourse and the type of language protected under the First Amendment” and was bitten by the radioactive desire to explain the First Amendment by tossing around the n-word.

To Sewell’s credit, she resigned the next day, fully grasping that she’d made it untenable to continue working in an academic environment. That’s the kind of professional responsibility that doesn’t often show up in incidents like this — it’s not an excuse for doing it in the first place, but it should be recognized in a world where too many just double down.

From the New York Post:

“Gonna say a lot of offensive things in here, because it’s impossible to talk about the First Amendment without saying horrible things,” Sewell said during the discussion, which a student in the crowd recorded. “Um, you know, ‘You’re just a dumb n—-r and I hate you.’ That alone, that’s protected speech.”

Indeed, it is! It’s also entirely unnecessary to say it when making the point.

But the worst twist came later when astute observers noticed that Sewell was saying “f-word,” you know, so she wouldn’t offend anybody.

However, SGA Senator Daniel Ojo said afterwards that Sewell continued with her example and used the term “f-word” in an attempt to censor herself, but didn’t seem to worry about using the n-word.

“So, you didn’t censor the n-word, but you definitely censored f—,” Ojo said.

Yeah, that says a lot.

Whenever this comes up, there’s a cadre of hot-take artists ready to duke it out online about how professors need to be able to use literal examples of racial slurs in class or the education system will fall apart. Those folks are wrong, but let’s sidestep this question for a second.

Even if you ascribe to the worldview that academic discourse requires white people to use literal examples of hate speech to describe the First Amendment, why are we only ever hearing about the n-word? These days there doesn’t seem to be the burning desire to toss around anti-Semitic slurs. Or homophobic rhetoric. Or derogatory terms for women. These are all equally protected terms, yet they never seem to work their way into these examples.

If this really is just an academic exercise, why does it always have to be this specific example? Because that says a lot too.

University of North Texas lawyer resigns after using n-word at free speech panel [New York Post]
UNT System assistant general counsel says the n-word at “When Hate Comes to Campus” event [North Texas Daily]

Earlier: T14 Law School Professor’s Tradition Of Using The N-Word In Class
The Original Emory Law School N-Word-Using Professor Faces A Hearing On His Future Today
Welcome To Emory Law School — It’s Been 0 Days Since We Last Used The N-Word In Class
Why Can’t Emory Law School Professors Stop Using The N-Word All The Time?
Law School Professor Drops The N-Word In The First Week Of Class
Law School Professor Who Dropped The N-Word In Class Is Back At It
Law Professor Drops Racial Slur In Class Because Otherwise How Will Black Students Ever Learn About Racism?

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.