Category: News Feeds

There are some benefits to a Biglaw firm that moves nimbly and quickly matches whatever salary raises market leaders announce. You get a bunch of publicity, associates are happy, and you prove your willingness to stay at the front of the Biglaw pack.

But there’s also a downside — that is, if another firm (cough, Davis Polk, cough) decides to come over the top and change up the new market standard riiiiiiight after you made your big announcement.

As Cadwalader is learning.

Managing partner Patrick Quinn circulated this note today:

We thank you again for your outstanding work on behalf of our clients during what has been an extremely busy year to date for our Firm. I’m proud of what we are accomplishing together.

As a follow-up to my note last week regarding announced base salary increases for our attorneys, we are committed to continuing to pay top of market, and we intend to match Friday’s increased base salary levels.

So yay for CWT associates. Though we expected the re-raise. That’s what happened in 2018 when Cravath came over the top of Milbank’s raises. There will almost certainly be more of the $200K scale firms moving to the $205K scale.

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Raises”). 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’ll 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.

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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).

The news from Capitol Hill these days inevitably tends to center on the seemingly doomed infrastructure negotiations. And why not? Conflict makes for good headlines. With the White House still hundreds of billions away from Republicans’ lowball infrastructure offer, there is going to be plenty more conflict on that front.

But while everyone’s been distracted by the apparent partisan gridlock on infrastructure, the Senate went ahead and quietly passed one of the largest industrial bills in American history. What’s more, the bill passed with an overwhelming bipartisan Senate majority.

The core of the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, formerly known as “Endless Frontier,” was authored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Todd Young, a Republican from Indiana (the pair likely had the assistance of a small army of congressional staffers given that the final version of the Senate bill clocks in at around 2,400 pages). It seeks to distribute $250 billion to improve American manufacturing and tech capabilities.

Nearly $52 billion is set aside in the bill to fund semiconductor research, design, and manufacturing work. The measure would overhaul the National Science Foundation, and between fiscal year 2022 and 2026, appropriate tens of billions for the agency.

If it ultimately becomes law, it will establish a Directorate for Technology and Innovation. The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act creates grants, facilitates agreements between private companies and research universities to speed the development of new technology, and seeks to reinforce weak spots in critical supply chains that were only recently revealed by the pandemic. After a frenzy of insertions into the bill to win it broader support in the Senate, it also includes a new round of funding for NASA and doubles the yearly budget for a Pentagon research agency.

Somewhat amazingly, given our current political climate, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act passed in the Senate with a strong bipartisan vote of 68-32. The reason for this overwhelming support from both sides of the aisle might have a little bit to do with lawmakers’ renewed option to try to insert pet projects into legislation. But even more powerful was the bill’s selling point as a powerful counter to the growing economic competitiveness of China and other authoritarian rivals overseas.

Even many conservatives who are typically wary of large spending bills under Democratic administrations were on board, so long as they could portray their support as an effort to keep up with China.

“This type of targeted investment in a critical industry was unthinkable just a couple years ago, but the need for smart industrial policy is now widely accepted,” said Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, according to the New York Times.

“For everything from national security to economic policy, there’s a clear and urgent need to reorient the way our country views and responds to the challenge from China,” added Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican who has in the past criticized government subsidization of the semiconductor industry but now views it as a necessity.

The urgency to compete with China and other growing industrial and technological economies might be one of the few things that can unite Democratic and Republican lawmakers in the current political climate. Still, although the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act passed with strong support in the Senate, it faces additional hurdles in the House.

Both Democrats and Republicans in the House have expressed displeasure with some aspects of the legislation. If the bill can survive another round of lobbying as it works its way through the House chamber, it will become law: President Biden applauded the Senate for passing the measure, and expressed hope that he would sign it into law “as soon as possible.”

Even though partisan gridlock fills the headlines, it’s worth remembering that the occasional bipartisan bill rises above the rancor. Apparently, combating the economic threat posed by Chinese innovation with a massive investment in high-tech American industry and advanced research is just the kind of uniting force lawmakers need to at least temporarily set aside their differences.

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com. 

Whew, it looks like today is the day that Biglaw gets *really* serious about these associate raises. It’s been the busiest raise day since Milbank pushed open the floodgates last Thursday, and we are here for it.

It was only earlier today that we lamented the… slowness of West Coast firms at adopting the new, $205,000 compensation scale set by Davis Polk. Now, a veritable California mainstay, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, have announced they are onboard with raises for on-track associates and Of Counsel in China, Hong Kong, U.K., and the U.S.

Class	Comp Year	Annual Base Pay
Fall Associates	2021	$202,500
First Year	2020	$205,000
Second Year	2019	$215,000
Third Year	2018	$240,000
Fourth Year	2017	$275,000
Fifth Year	2016	$305,000
Sixth Year	2015	$330,000
Seventh Year	2014	$350,000
Eighth Year	2013	$365,000

The firm also noted that summers will get a pro rated cut of the $202,500 salary. Raises for associates and Of Counsel beyond the class of 2013 will be communicated separately, while senior counsel, staff attorneys, and other non-partnership track attorneys will have to wait till year-end for any extra money.

You can read the firm’s full memo on the next page.

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Raises”). 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’ll 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.

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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).

Congressman Jim Jordan is big mad. Why won’t the Justice Department investigate the extremely credible claim that Italian satellites threw the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden? Not even after White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows sent him a YouTube video “proving” it!

“That is a problem,” the Ohio congressman thundered at yesterday’s Oversight Committee hearing on the Capitol Insurrection, referring to the recently released cache of emails showing a sustained pressure campaign by the White House to force the Justice Department to interfere in the 2020 election. “When the chief of staff to the president of the United States asks someone in the executive branch to do something, and they basically give him the finger, I think that’s the problem we should be looking into.”

To be clear, the Italygate theory is beyond batshit. It involves Barack Obama amassing a secret $400 million war chest, then cahootsing with former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to disrupt vote tabulation in key swing states using Italian military satellites. And somehow this was all coordinated at the US Embassy in Rome, according to Brad Johnson, a self-described retired “CIA Station Chief” and current Epoch Times columnist.

On New Years Day, Meadows forwarded a video by Johnson entitled “Rome, Satellites, Servers: an Update” to acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. Unfortunately said video has since been removed for violating YouTube’s terms of service, which just goes to show how far THEY will go to hide the truth!

Rudy Giuliani also tried to get the FBI to engage with Johnson, and called it “an insult” when AG Rosen invited him to walk into the nearest FBI field office and tell the nice man at the counter all about the #ItalyDidIt plot.

Rep. Jordan was similarly incensed that the DOJ failed to hop to it and investigate the allegations of massive vote fraud in Georgia being flogged by then Foley & Lardner partner Cleta Mitchell in concert with the Trump campaign. The same day he was spamming Rosen with spaghetti Westerns, Meadows instructed Rosen to “get Jeff Clark [then head of the Civil Rights Division] to engage on this issue immediately to determine if there is any truth to this allegation.”

There wasn’t.

Democrats were outraged that the White House Chief of Staff was instructing the DOJ to coordinate with the Trump campaign to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State to decertify the state’s electoral votes. But Jordan was only pissed about the scandal of an independent Justice Department refusing to follow White House orders.

“Wow, lotta pressure there,” he sneered sarcastically. “Every chief of staff I bet for every single one of us sends the same kind of emails and letters every day. You get constituents, if people call you, you send it to the agency: ‘Can you look into this?’”

Which is true, as far as it goes. But that’s not very far, because congress isn’t the DOJ’s boss. By custom, there’s supposed to be a firewall between the White House and the Justice Department to ensure independent law enforcement — as Mr. Jordan surely knows, since he screamed bloody murder about the Obama White House unmasking Michael Flynn after he got picked up on a wire tap of the Russian ambassador promising sanctions relief after Trump was inaugurated.

But worse than violating norms, Meadows’s blatant attempt to interfere with the Department violates the White House’s own policy, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein points out.

A 2017 memorandum to all White House staff authored by then White House Counsel Don McGahn admonishes employees that only he, the President, and the Vice President are to have any contact with the Justice Department.

“In order to ensure that DOJ exercises its investigatory and prosecutorial functions free from the fact or appearance of improper political influence, these rules must be strictly followed,” he wrote [emphasis original], cautioning that the Counsel’s office needed to approve any other communications and “unless you are certain that the particular contact is permissible, you must consult with the Counsel’s Office before proceeding.”

Not only did Meadows transgress long-established norms meant to protect the Justice Department from just the kind of political interference he engaged in, but he was also in flagrant violation of the White House’s own policy.

But disregarding flagrant violations is kind of Jim Jordan’s bag, so perhaps yesterday’s antics should come as no surprise.

Jordan tears into DOJ officials for hostility to Meadows’ election fraud inquiries [Politico]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

Look, there aren’t any good puns to use off of Seward. Riffing on Alaska being Seward’s Folly seems very obscure for a story like this one. And something about Han Solo making the KISSEL run in less than 12 parsecs? I don’t even know how we’d work that in. So you’re getting a sealed with a kiss take and you’re going to like it.

Anyway, Seward & Kissel doesn’t play the Am Law 100 game so we don’t have those numbers to share, but it’s letting its compensation do the talking when it comes to reporting the health of the firm. They’re doing just fine.

As of July 1, associates will be making the now-prevailing market scale. The full memo is available here, but here are the salary figures:

The memo informs associates that there will be bonus structure updates “in the near future” so there’s more news to come out of this firm! Congrats.

Please help us help you when it comes to salary news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Salary”) 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 Salary & 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.

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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.

Wooboy! The new associate compensation scale is really making the rounds today. And we are seeing it go beyond Biglaw. The latest elite boutique to get in on the action is Selendy & Gay.

Earlier today, the firm announced they were moving compensation onto the scale set by Davis Polk, effective July 1. That means salaries at the firm will be as follows:

Class	Salary
2021	$202,500
2020	$205,000
2019	$215,000
2018	$240,000
2017	$275,000
2016	$305,000
2015	$330,000
2014	$350,000

But that’s not all. In the announcement, the firm also reiterated its intention to come over the top when year-end bonuses come around.

As you know, earlier this year we announced our intention, once again, to  exceed the bonus scale established by other market-leading firms.  We anticipate paying year-end bonuses significantly above the 2021 market for all associates who are meeting or exceeding the Firm’s expectations.

You can read the firm’s full memo on the next page.

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Raises”). 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’ll 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.

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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).

Back in 2016, when Biglaw firms began the drive to a $180K payscale, one firm came out and tried to get their associates to look away from the compensation frenzy and just be happy that they have jobs at all. They ultimately caved to market pressure that year, but managed to avoid joining its Am Law peers in raising salaries in 2018.

Well, as the legal landscape shifts to $205K, Seyfarth Shaw is adopting a scale that looks a lot more like the 2018 norm.

Seyfarth Shaw is 63rd in the Am Law 100 with $717,032,000 in 2020 gross revenue, though its rate structure isn’t quite the same as the firms around it on the list, so it’s not entirely unreasonable that it might not go all the way to the prevailing top Biglaw pay structure.

Here’s the multi-tiered scale structure:

Adding to the time warp aspect, it appears that Seyfarth is joining the trend that other Biglaw firms jumped on back in 2016 and unmooring the top scale from New York. Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, and both LA offices are going to be paid the same as the New York associates now.

It’s an interesting development considering this cycle has seen a few firms go the other direction and embrace office differentiation.

So for most Seyfarth associates around the country, this announcement is great news. And they can probably book their $205K scale raise for, I dunno, 2024?

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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.

Biglaw firms are racing to match the new market salary scale for associates, and we’ve gotten to the point today where as each hour passes, another firm announces that it’s decided to increase salaries. Which is the latest firm to make it rain on associates?

It’s Norton Rose Fulbright, a firm that came in at No. 13 on the most recent Am Law 100 ranking, taking home $1,877,933,000 gross revenue in 2020. The firm is of course matching the prevailing Davis Polk salary scale — but only in some of its offices. If you recall, the firm did the same thing when it came to its special bonuses (and was one of the only firms to do so), offering payouts on a “regional scale” in some of its smaller markets. This is what associates in the firm’s California, New York, Texas, and D.C. offices will be earning come July 1:

• 2021: $202,500
• 2020: $205,000
• 2019: $215,000
• 2018: $240,000
• 2017: $275,000
• 2016: $305,000
• 2015: $330,000
• 2014: $350,000
• 2013: $365,000

What will associates in the firm’s other offices — in Denver, St. Louis, and Minneapolis — be earning? We assume those payouts will also be made on a “regional scale,” just like Polsinelli announced earlier in this raise cycle.

Congratulations to (almost) everyone at the firm on their new market salaries. For those in smaller markets, just remember, any raise is better than no raise!

(Flip to the next page to see the memo from Norton Rose Fulbright.)

We depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. 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’ll 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.

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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.

Associates across Biglaw are sitting on pins and needles waiting for the moment their firm finally announces raises. The new compensation scheme was only announced last week, but when you’re anxious about whether you’ll get a raise to meet the new market standard, well, it can feel like an eternity.

The good news is that for folks at Akin Gump, the waiting game is over. Today, the firm announced they, too, would be raising associate salaries (between $205,000 and $365,000, depending on class year) like their peer firms.

Associates — including summer associates — in the U.S., London, and Hong Kong can expect compensation on the below scale, effective July 1:

Counsel and senior counsel raises will be communicated separately on July 1.

You can read the firm’s full memo on the next page.

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of this stuff. So when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Raises”). 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’ll 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.

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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).

Ed. note: This is the second in a new series on work-life balance. Read the first installment here. 

For many attorneys, the concept of “work-life balance” can seem like an urban legend, except even more far-fetched.

Indeed, maintaining time for a robust life outside the office can seem like a mythical concept — like a beautiful unicorn or a Harvard alum who never mentions where they went to school.

At Paragon Legal, we aim to provide both flexibility and high-level work, allowing lawyers to finally make work-life balance a reality.

And from the client’s perspective, happy lawyers are better positioned to deliver top-quality work than those who are burned out.

In the first installment of this series, we noted how lawyers can audit, guard, and schedule their time. Here, we provide additional tips to manage your day.

Try Time Blocking

Time blocking is when you divvy up your day into blocks of time, during which you focus on specific tasks.

For instance, you may only check email messages for 10-11 a.m. and 4:30-5:30 p.m., allowing you to avoid constant email interruptions while you’re working on projects.

When you decide to do certain tasks is also important.

For some people, it’s easier to tackle important tasks in the morning, while others may find they have better focus in the afternoons. Try scheduling tasks that require more concentration for when you have better focus.

(For even more on when to schedule certain tasks, check out When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel Pink.)

Reduce Multitasking

From Slack notifications to news alerts, we live in a distraction-heavy world.

But each of those interruptions can come with a time cost — it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task at hand, according to Gloria Mark, a professor at the University of California, Irvine.

To protect your focus, minimize switching between tasks as much as possible.

Mute that group chat, turn off unnecessary social media notifications, and even consider putting your phone in silent mode or in a drawer while working on a project.

Use a Timer

Using a timer can also be immensely helpful in keeping you focused, while also encouraging short breaks to keep your brain fresh.

The Pomodoro Tracker will help you use the Pomodoro Technique, which is a popular time management system in which you focus on a task for 25 minutes, followed by a five-minute break.

Similar apps exist for your phone, like Focus Keeper or the Bear Focus Timer, which acts as both a timer and a way to stop you from checking your phone screen. There are also a plethora of tools — such as Dewo and Freedom — that will help you reduce pesky app distractions.

Outsource, Delegate, Just Say No 

Sometimes, the best way to find more time is to get rid of a task altogether. In Time Smart, Harvard professor Ashley Whillans advocates for outsourcing tasks that you especially dislike, noting that shelling out a bit on “time-saving services — like shopping, cleaning, and laundry — can reduce time stress and increase happiness.”

Similarly, don’t be afraid to delegate tasks, even if it means giving up some element of control. There’s no sense in lengthening your workday by insisting on doing things you could be giving to others (as long as they have room on their plate for it).

And if you’re a perfectionist who struggles with delegation, keep in mind how perfectionism could be stealing your time in other ways — for instance, by spending 20 minutes perfecting an email that really could have been written in 10.

Finally, harness the power of saying no. This can be tricky for people pleasers or folks who are eager to show they’re team players. But attending every meeting or taking on too many projects can make you feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day.

When possible (and we know it isn’t always possible, but go with us here), try gently excusing yourself from unnecessary meetings or extra projects.

And hey, if there’s no way you’re getting out of that hefty request that a partner just emailed you, at least you’ve got these other time management tips to help.