Top Biglaw Firm Gives Out Delayed Special Bonuses

Is a spring bonus still special if associates have to wait until the fall to see any money?

That’s the query for associates at Hunton Andrews Kurth who received word that their firm will be matching the market standard for Biglaw special bonuses. It’s certainly good news for those associates, but there’s a catch.

Check out the bonus schedule below:

Hmmm, those payments are a good deal later than at peer firms. As a reminder, most Biglaw firms are doing payments in the spring/summer then the second one in fall/winter. But at Hunton, associates’ first payment more directly lines up with the second payments at most firms. However, they are not the only firm to push the payments into 2022.

A sympathetic tipster noted the firm’s fiscal calendar is to blame for the delay:

Same numbers as everyone else, but paid on a different timeline bc of our April-March fiscal year.

And I’m sure it doesn’t hurt that associates will have to stick at the firm through April of 2022 to get their full payment.

The firm noted that, to be eligible for the bonuses, associates must be in good standing and billing 1900 hours annualized. These will be in addition to any year-end bonuses. You can read the firm’s full memo 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.


headshotKathryn 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).

Enter your email address to sign up for ATL’s Bonus & Salary Increase Alerts.

Immigration Reform During A Pandemic? Biden Administration Comes Out Swinging

The COVID-19 pandemic had a dramatic effect on immigration law, disrupting policies that were already shaken up by the Trump Administration during its first three years. Practitioners who advise on immigration law now must keep up with changes wrought by the pandemic as well as near-daily immigration news from the Biden Administration.

For the previous Administration, “COVID created the opportunity to significantly curtail legal immigration,” says immigration law expert Austin T. Fragomen, Jr., Chairman of the Executive Committee at Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen, & Loewy, LLP and co-author of Fragomen on Immigration Fundamentals: A Guide to Law and Practice, Fifth Edition, available from PLI Press. In a recent article in the PLI Chronicle, Fragomen outlines the immigration actions taken by the Biden Administration in its early days and anticipates changes to come.

An emphasis on prioritizing immigration reform this early in a President’s tenure is “startling,” given this topic’s traditional status as a “third rail” in American politics, Fragomen observes. Nevertheless, the new administration has forged ahead on issues including DACA, the “travel ban,” employment and more.

Click to read Fragomen’s article, What Can We Expect on Immigration from the Biden Administration? For more insights and perspectives for the legal community, visit the PLI Chronicle on PLI PLUS. Visit PLI.edu for immigration-related programs and publications.


Practising Law Institute is a nonprofit learning organization dedicated to keeping attorneys and other professionals at the forefront of knowledge and expertise. PLI is chartered by the Regents of the University of the State of New York and was founded in 1933 by Harold P. Seligson. The organization provides the highest quality, accredited, continuing legal and professional education programs in a variety of formats which are delivered by more than 4,000 volunteer faculty including prominent lawyers, judges, investment bankers, accountants, corporate counsel, and U.S. and international government regulators. PLI publishes a comprehensive library of Treatises, Course Handbooks, Answer Books and Journals also available through the PLI PLUS online platform. The essence of PLI’s mission is its commitment to the pro bono community. View PLI’s upcoming live webcasts here.

MD Legislature Abolishes Special Bill Of Rights Just For Cops

(image via Getty)

“Maryland is leading the country in transforming our broken policing system. I am proud to lead the House in overriding each of the governor’s police reform vetoes,” tweeted Maryland’s House Speaker Adrienne Jones on Saturday after the legislature overrode Governor Larry Hogan’s veto of multiple bills to overhaul policing in the state.

“Now, for the first time in our nation’s history, the rights of officers will not be held above the rights of individuals, and policing in Maryland will be transparent and citizen-centered.”

The Maryland Police Accountability Act of 2021 revokes the state’s Law Enforcement Bill of Rights and codifies a system to hold police accountable for misconduct while imposing multiple new restrictions on use of force. In addition to limiting no knock warrants and mandating body-worn cameras, the law imposes an obligation on officers both to intervene to stop a colleague from using excessive force and to report such illegal activity to superiors after the fact.

The bill further makes police misconduct charges public records, even those that were not sustained, and increases the role of civilian boards in adjudicating those charges.

In vetoing the bill, Governor Hogan accused legislators of caving to a “political agenda” and claimed that only serving no knock warrants between 8am and 7pm “endangers police officers, occupants, and bystanders.” Similarly he argued that publishing police misconduct allegations would “place the officers’ safety at risk, erode officers’ relationships with the residents of our most vulnerable communities, and deter witness participation in the prosecution of violent crimes.”

Although he failed to say exactly how publicly acknowledging which cops have the most excessive force complaints against them would “deter” witnesses from coming forward to testify. It’s not as if Black residents of the state don’t know which cops are harassing them — the issue is making it visible to White people, too, in the way that cell phone cameras made George Floyd’s killing “real” to White America.

George Floyd’s killing did not spark the same kind of unrest here in Maryland as it did in other parts of the country, perhaps because we’re still processing the violence after Freddie Gray’s death at the hands of Baltimore City police. Six years ago today officers threw Gray, a 25-year-old Black man, in the back of the police van for the “rough ride” that severed his spine, killing him a week later.

And while the Baltimore Uprising was traumatic for all Maryland residents, it was certainly less traumatic than generations of Black citizens being systematically harassed or worse by law enforcement. There’s a reason Freddie Gray ran from the cops that day even though he was doing nothing wrong.

“I want to make it out alive, too,” said Del. C.T. Wilson, a Black Democrat.

“When I look into that officer’s eyes, they’re not looking at me like I’m another human being,” Wilson said. “At best, I’m a threat. At worst, I’m an animal. That is unacceptable.”

In the intervening six years, Baltimore City’s police force agreed to implement a series of reforms under a consent decree by the Obama Justice Department — a decree Attorney General Jeff Sessions tried to void. And Baltimore City’s Gun Trace Task Force imploded under a spectacular corruption scandal sparked when a Harford County cop went to put a tracking device on a suspect’s car, only to discover another, unregistered device already there. Because City cops were tracking drug dealers’ cars so they could break into their homes and rob them at leisure. Yes, literally.

So, yeah, we need police reform here. And not just in the City, either. Just a week ago, an off-duty Capitol cop fatally shot two suspects in Montgomery County as they fled in a stolen car.

“They were shot in the back,” Del. David Moon said.

“Guess what color they were? They were Black. . . . You cannot tell me that we don’t need this legislation. Literally as we were debating this, this happened. It’s unacceptable, this culture of violence.”

Similarly, Anton Black, a 19-year-old college student, was killed in 2018 as he was being restrained by three Caroline County police officers. The county fought for months to keep body cam footage of the incident from the family, and later it emerged that one of the officers had racked up dozens of use-fo-force complaints as a police officer in Delaware.

It’s not a few bad apples, and Maryland’s supermajority legislator wasted no time in breezing past Hogan’s veto on Saturday. They also abolished life sentences for juveniles and returned local control of the police force to Baltimore City for the first time in 160 years.

It’s a start.

Maryland enacts landmark police overhaul, first state to repeal police bill of rights [WaPo]
Maryland legislators pass landmark police reform package into law, overriding Gov. Hogan’s vetoes [Baltimore Sun]


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

The Legal Oppression Of Nonbelievers Will Escalate The More Religion Declines

I should not have to care whether my religious beliefs conflict with the majority of those in any branch of our government. The Constitution — as enumerated in Article VI Section 3 and the First Amendment — is supposed to guarantee that government should not care that for the first time ever the number of Americans who belong to a church has fallen below a majority. Unfortunately, a lot of people do care. In fact, some are downright terrified at the decline in religion. And it just so happens, many people who are terrified are also in government.

According to the most recent Attorney General, William Barr, this country was founded on the premise (expressed by John Adamas that one time) that our government “was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.” An attorney general saying this country is only intended and suitable for religious people is deeply disturbing for a couple of reasons. First, one John Adams quote notwithstanding, the Constitution’s plain language that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” directly contradicts it. It takes a massive, unsubstantiated leap to say our government was intended only to be suitable and sustainable for religious people when religious oaths were banned from the beginning and the only other mention is that government must stay out of religious affairs. Second, and more troubling, is believing government is only suitable and sustainable for religious people means those citizens who does not believe by very definition become unsuitable. Which is exactly what William Barr thinks.

To Barr, nonbelievers are everything that’s wrong with this country. Barr views nonbelievers, as a collective, as directly responsible for “the wreckage of the family,” and “record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing number of angry and alienated young males, an increase of senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.” Such views are not only facially bigoted (imagine saying Christianity and Christians were responsible for such things) but provably untrue.

Violent crime has not increased but drastically decreased during the period of religious decline. Families are not being wrecked. In fact, divorce rates have not only fallen significantly in the past year, but have also dropped appreciably over the past decade. The decline of religion is driving an irrational demonization and hatred of nonbelievers, and we are seeing this play out not just rhetorically, but in the courts.

Federal courts have banned nonbelievers from speaking to their own legislatures, banned nonbelievers from holding private jobs such as wedding celebrants for nonbeliever couples. Another federal panel (that included the liberal-minded Diane Wood and now-Justice Amy Barrett Coney) held last fall that states can favor religious gatherings over nonreligious expressive gatherings, including political gatherings. Never mind that political speech has been universally recognized as being at the heart of the First Amendment guarantee. Never mind there are many cases in which the Supreme Court has held, again, and again, and again, that religious expression must be treated equally with nonreligious expression. Because it is painfully obvious the law has nothing to do with such decisions.

Favoring religion in the law and disfavoring nonbelievers can only be explained by bigotry. Only a bigot would claim religious citizens and religious expression is worth more to this country than nonreligious citizens and nonreligious expression. Only a bigot would claim this country is “only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.”

But what can a nonbeliever do against such bigotry?

The absolute worst response to bigotry is more bigotry. Dr. Martin Luther King led a successful movement of American citizens (who had suffered far worse oppression than nonbelievers currently are), because he and these Americans rejected responding to bigotry in kind. Fear, hatred, and anger does not make lasting peace. Nonbelievers must respond by being better and fighting for universal freedom of conscience and denouncing any attempt by government to favor or disfavor citizens or their expression based on religious belief. Standing up for universal free conscience rights also means acknowledging where religious fears are legitimate.

If this now decades-long trend continues, nonbelievers will become the majority. In the short term, with a religious conservative ideological takeover of the courts, the continued rise in nonbelief is going to result in more restructuring of the First Amendment to favor the religious at the expense of nonbeliever free conscience. Last Friday, the Supreme Court reinvented religious liberty using an entirely new interpretation where the oldest precedent cited was from 2020. If or when a nonbeliever majority is achieved, nonbelievers must work to rebalance the courts to reverse the bigotry and restructuring of the law to serve partisan ends.


Tyler Broker’s work has been published in the Gonzaga Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and is forthcoming in the University of Memphis Law Review. Feel free to email him or follow him on Twitter to discuss his column.

The Top Law Firms For Gender Equity & Family-Friendly Policies (2021)

(Image via Getty)

Gender equality is given a lot of lip service in the legal profession, and yet women continue to face many disparities when they sign on for work each and every day. From pay to partnership promotions to the composition of leadership committees to family policies, there are many areas where law firms must change to keep up with the times — especially during the pandemic era. Thankfully, some law firms are becoming more progressive, but which firms are doing the best they can for women in all areas?

For the third year in a row, the Yale Law Women have released a ranking of the Top Firms for Gender Equity, coupled with its annual list of the Top Family-Friendly Firms. We’ve written about the latter ranking every year (see our coverage from 2018201720162015201420132012201120102009, and 2008), and covered YLW’s important new dual ranking in 2019 and 2020.

Which firms made the cut in 2021? Let’s take a look at the latest rankings.

This year’s rankings were based off 10 distinct categories, with honors given reflecting top firms’ strengths. These are the firms being honored:

  • Hiring Practices: Morgan Lewis
    • Honorable Mentions: Ballard Spahr; Reed Smith; WilmerHale
  • Diverse Leadership: Morrison & Foerster
    • Honorable Mentions: Littler; Paul Weiss; WilmerHale
  • Training & Mentorship: Jenner & Block
    • Honorable Mentions: Cahill Gordon; Paul Weiss; Wachtell
  • Part-Time Options: Jenner & Block
    • Honorable Mentions: Blank Rome; Foley Hoag; Littler
  • LGBTQ+ Representation: Latham & Watkins
    • Honorable Mentions: Akin Gump; Reed Smith
  • Promotion Practices: WilmerHale
    • Honorable Mentions: Simpson Thacher; Wilson Sonsini; Winston & Strawn
  • Support for New Parents: Orrick
    • Honorable Mentions: Proskauer; Winston & Strawn
  • Health & Wellness: Cleary Gottlieb
    • Honorable Mentions: Akin Gump; Orrick
  • Racial Justice Contributions: Pillsbury
    • Honorable Mentions: Morgan Lewis; Reed Smith; Simpson Thacher
  • COVID-19 Response: Wachtell Lipson Rosen & Katz
    • Honorable Mentions: Morgan Lewis; Simpson Thacher; Winston & Strawn

Here’s a round-up of useful information about some of the YLW study’s findings:

  • 63.4% of firms track gender demographics of associates each partner works with
  • 7.9% of women promoted to equity partner had worked part-time in the last year
  • 9.4% of junior associates identified as LGBTQ+, while 3.7% of equity partners did the same
  • 37.8% of attorneys promoted to equity partners in 2020 were women
  • 9% of attorneys promoted to equity partners in 2020 were women of color
  • 58.5% of firms give equal time off to primary & secondary caregivers
  • 46% of firms have a centralized flex work policy
  • 95% of firms made donations to racial justice organizations
  • 61% of firms have implicit bias training for all attorneys that has been updated since 2020
  • 12% of Equity Partners are POC
  • 97% of firms gave paid time off to workers who contracted COVID without a test as proof
  • 78% of firms did not require any employees to work in-person during the pandemic

Please click here (PDF) to see the full report from Yale Law Women.

While vast improvements have been made in terms of gender equity and parental accommodations offerings at large law firms, there is still a lot of work to be done. We said this in the past, but it bears repeating in times like these: “The legal profession has come a long way in terms of attempting to afford equal opportunities for success for both men and women, but it’s still got a long way to go. Why are lawyers still hurrying up and waiting for change?” Be forces for good at your firms. Women deserve to be treated equally, and allies have never been more important. Offer help where help is needed, and together, we can achieve true greatness.

Congratulations to all of the Biglaw firms that made the Yale Law Women Gender Equity & Family Friendliness ranking. How did your firm do this time around? Email us, text us at (646) 820-8477, or tweet us @atlblog.


Staci ZaretskyStaci 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.

Amy Chua Defends Herself And Floodgates Open With Alums Calling BS

Discretion is the better part of valor and you shouldn’t f**k around lest you find out. These lessons probably should have guided Yale Law’s Amy Chua when she pushed back against the administration’s decision to remove her from a small 1L mentorship group.

Honestly, Chua’s “punishment” is almost too insignificant to note. If the administration is correct that the professor continued to bring students to her home after her husband was suspended — but not fired — over sexual harassment allegations, losing a token group discussion class is the least of what a responsible organization could do.

Or, hell, maybe they did fire Rubenfeld and just not tell anybody. An eagle-eyed tipster noted that Justin Driver is the “Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law,” which is the named chair that Rubenfeld previously held.

Either way, if the school thinks Chua breached an agreement created to protect students, being asked not to do extra work is hardly a penalty.

But rather than take her slap on the wrist in stride, Chua pushed back against the Yale Daily News in an open letter to her colleagues. And that’s when alums started coming out of the woodwork to call bullshit on her defense.

Alums have used words like “bullying” and “creepy” to describe the “Chuafeld” world. And folks who may otherwise have stayed silent have opened up about the transgressions they’ve seen. Frustration is another theme… frustration that this is going to be another minor blip before the school goes right back to enabling the professors.

This cycle has happened before, and it will happen again: students complain and the law school appears to take action, but a few years go by and everything goes back to normal…. In one instance, [Gerken and Cosgrove] represented to us that Chua would never have a small group again. Apparently, that was not a firm commitment, given recent events. I have little faith that whatever happens now will be more than another delicate slap on the wrist for Chua, a mere gesture to appease students without making any lasting difference.

Which aren’t just limited internally to Yale. Remember that this is the woman who trumpeted Brett Kavanaugh while apparently privately noting… issues.

And this all reminds us that Chua was a Kozinski enabler too.

By “a select few,” Milan means J.D. Vance, whom Chua steered away from Kozinski’s chambers and toward his ultimate path of shamelessly throwing his family under a speeding bus to advance his own career.

Many (though not all) of the stories we’ve all heard over the last several days would have stayed buried if Chua had just stayed silent. The common thread in these tips is that the response letter is what incensed them.

She does have her defenders though. I got an email this morning from an anonymous account claiming — through some wicked grammatical errors — to represent a coalition of law firms coming after me for reporting on Yale’s administrative decisions. It reeked of the brand of petty Mean Girls nonsense that all these alums say they felt subjected to throughout their law school careers. Not to borrow from the first article, but there are always gonna be some Gretchens out there.

Earlier: Yale Law School Strips Amy Chua Of 1L Group For Repeated Violations


HeadshotJoe 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.

The Business Of Law And Gender Equality: Merging Considerations

From securing a representation, to addressing firmwide business planning in an ongoing matter, to financing the costs of a case, there are numerous business considerations that emerge during the lifecycle of a dispute. 

Panelists at the recent Women Lead the Law event, sponsored by the Cardozo Women Alumni Group, explored this lifecycle in the “Business of Law” panel, touching on topics as varied as personal and firm-wide business development, the potential role of litigation finance, fair pricing of a lawyer’s efforts, and how women can advocate for their careers while building business.

The discussion was part of a weeklong conference celebrating Women’s History Month at Cardozo Law, co-sponsored by Cardozo’s Recent Alumni Leadership Council. 

Elise Holtzman, owner of business development firm the Lawyer’s Edge, started with some harsh statistics on the very real gender gap that exists in the law, based on research by the National Association of Women Lawyers: “Of their top 10 revenue-generating attorneys, most firms have zero women in that group. Of the top 10 most highly compensated attorneys, most firms also have women as zero women in that group.” 

Holtzman went on to address how business development can help give lawyers power, which is critical in an industry where women make up about half of the associate ranks but are grossly underrepresented at the partnership level. 

“It’s important for you, as an individual, and particularly as a woman, because being successful when it comes to business development can help you drive change and give you power” she said.

As Holtzman explained, the simple reality is that, at most firms, the lawyers who bring in business are more highly valued. 

“When we talk about lawyers, you’ll hear about finders, minders and grinders — the finders are the people who bring in the business, the minders are people who take care of the client, and the grinders are the people who are grinding out the work,” she says. “And for whatever reason, finders are viewed as more equal than everybody else.”

Increasing business development among women attorneys — becoming “finders” — increases access to the power to control their own careers.

Here, we present some key takeaways from the discussion. 

From Problem Solver to Business Partner

Jenna Polivy, business development manager at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, noted that the business of law has been changing significantly and quickly over the last decade, with competition for legal services exponentially increasing. 

Client expectations have become more nuanced, with clients looking at law firm capabilities beyond the traditional areas of legal expertise, toward technology and innovation. 

“Clients are also increasingly expecting lawyers to understand their businesses, their industries, and the clients themselves,” Polivy explained.

According to Polivy, “everyone is now expected to be a businessperson,” so women lawyers who want to start closing the gender gap can make headway by mastering business development. In the 2021 market, this means understanding the clients’ businesses and positioning oneself as a strategic partner, not just an advisor or legal service provider. 

Holtzman, former lawyer and now consultant, outlined her three pillars of business development: building relationships, becoming a visible expert in your practice area, and leadership growth.

Making time for business development in your career shores up all three pillars and opens the door to success — business development isn’t something that’s just going to fall into your lap.

Litigation Finance: Business Development Enabler

While clients are certainly demanding more from outside counsel, cost is always on a client’s mind when choosing their law firms.

“When you talk about the business of law today, you can’t have that conversation without talking about litigation finance,” said Marla Decker, managing director at Lake Whillans Capital Partners

Decker explained how litigation finance addresses this need in the market. 

For a pre-agreed portion of the potential recovery, litigation financiers provide the necessary — and nonrecourse — funds for bringing a litigation from beginning to end. Too often, lawyers know of clients who need representation but lack the finances to engage a large firm. Third-party funding can help overcome that hurdle.

“The power to enable clients to bring cases through funding is an important tool for lawyers, especially younger lawyers and female lawyers who have to fight a little harder to bring cases in the door, where clients are not being handed to them,” Decker said. 

These attorneys can use litigation finance to establish themselves as rainmakers. Firms can use litigation finance to structure alternative fee arrangements that enable them to compete for engagements and empower lawyers in the firm to take risk that is mitigated by outside funding. 

The Need to Take Credit

The past decade has seen a shift in the legal industry, with purchasing moving away from more of a handshake or relationship model toward cost analysis and increasing efficiencies. However, while much of landing clients now revolves around price, relationships still matter. 

Austen Louis, director of client value and practice economics at BakerHostetler, weighed in on law firm logistics and the importance of knowing your worth as an attorney and getting recognition for your efforts.

He also advised that two of the biggest factors that attorneys can focus on to help create a foundation for success are origination credit and market rates. Unlike a number of other factors, these are things that lawyers can have some degree of control over.

An origination credit is some sort of record in the firm’s financial system of who the person is who brought in the work and is responsible for maintaining the client relationship. Many firms only allow origination credit for partners and not for associates, but lawyers can keep track of these metrics themselves and present them when it comes time to quantify their contribution to the firm. 

“To the extent that you are tracking this and monitoring it, it’s important to ensure that you have your own pipeline, that you are part of the financial discussion,” he explained, “and that you’re not simply handing the reins over to someone superior to you in the hierarchy, assuming that they will return the favor someday.”

The second factor is rate. 

In today’s law firm marketplace, “rate typically equals rank” Louis said. 

Clients implicitly rank lawyers’ skills on how much they charge, and firms also judge employees’ contributions based on the rates they bring into the firm. If you’re working in an environment that’s not purely lockstep, he advises, “be proactive for yourself.” 

“Make sure that you’re being priced fairly, that you’re not somehow being discounted from somebody down the hall.” 

As Louis points out: “Especially as a diverse attorney, you never know how these decisions are made, or if implicit bias is playing a role. You really should take it upon yourself to advocate for your own career by looking under the covers and making sure that the rate being charged for  you is fair and accurately assessed as your qualities of the marketplace.”

The Bottom Line

Much of the insight from The Business of Law panel boils down to being proactive and advocating for yourself, whether that’s in how you develop new business, how you can use funding to make yourself more competitive, how you’re getting credit for your efforts, or making sure you’re being priced fairly.

By advocating for their own careers and understanding the business aspects of the law, women lawyers will be putting themselves in the best position for success.

Boies Schiller Delights With Special Bonuses Of Their Own

Woohoo! We’re just about halfway through April and the Biglaw spring special bonuses are still hot news.

Last week, Boies, Schiller & Flexner announced their own special bonuses, and they’re on par with the market bonus rate, set by Davis Polk last month. Reaction from insiders has been pretty positive, as exemplified by this comment from a tipster:

We are all pretty pleased! Particularly so soon after COVID bonuses were paid!

The payment schedule is as follows:

Year May 2021 November 2021 Total
2020 $4,500 $7,500 $12,000
2019 $6,000 $10,000 $16,000
2018 $12,000 $20,000 $32,000
2017 $16,500 $27,500 $44,000
2016 $19,500 $32,500 $52,000
2015 $22,200 $37,000 $59,200
2014+ $24,000 $40,000 $64,000

The firm also clarified that, for associates choosing market compensation (remember associates at BSF can opt into market compensation or for the firm’s own contingency-style bonus structure), these bonuses will be in addition to typical year-end bonuses.

You can read the firm’s full memo 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.


headshotKathryn 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).

A Nuanced Kind Of Humility

Before you brush this off based on its title, it isn’t what you think. This is not a generic article telling you not to be cocky or not to be the stereotypical arrogant lawyer from the movies. This is about the way that humility manifests in various attributes that benefit you and improve your overall work experience. Sometimes, being driven involves more humility than confidence, because you have to be willing to “hustle” and network, and it can be humbling to try and fail and have to try again.

The 2008 crash humbled a lot of people, one of whom was Julie Honour. She had just been accepted at a great law firm, only to be made redundant on her first day, left alone in a city where she had bills to pay. She felt incredibly vulnerable but ultimately made the decision to embrace that vulnerability. She started telling everyone that she was looking for a job while speaking about the value that she could add. It took relentless determination — which she called “scrappiness” –- as well as an incredible amount of humility to acknowledge that what she needed was more important than her ego. In our interview, she speaks more about how scrappiness is the use of creativity to address the vulnerability.

Vulnerability, however, is not an experience that is unique to Julie or to you. In fact, the greatest form of vulnerability has been experienced by people in groups that were previously disadvantaged. Today, they are still trying to shed themselves of that dark legacy –- this is why Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) have become crucial parts of business today. DEI should not be window-dressing, nor just another title given to “add more value.” DEI is a weighty responsibility focused on taking actions toward sustainable change; it aims to reshape the collective consciousness. I can guarantee that you will encounter it at some point, and I implore you to have the humility to approach it with an open mind. DEI is meant to be a lifestyle that shapes your outlook, not a checklist to be completed. It is not singular, it is sustainable, a continuous process. If you are someone who strives for excellence, then you should be someone who strives for equity. According to Robyn Frank, an experienced professional in DEI, “Diversity always does better.”

I had another interesting conversation regarding the intersection of cultures in my interview with Aviram Gavish. Aviram is an in-house lawyer who specializes in international deals and cross-cultural teams. Over the years, he has managed to complement his wealth of experience with an equal amount of wisdom; he shared some fascinating insights with me. He cannot place enough emphasis on relationships. I believe that every relationship –- professional or otherwise –- is, first, a personal relationship, and Aviram wholeheartedly concurs. Relationships are crucial, and, within them, the art of listening is underappreciated and underutilized. Listening enables you to understand the needs and backgrounds of the others involved, as well as help to develop a better relationship with them. It is usually due to our lack of humility that we fail to listen, merely waiting to speak. That’s why Aviram takes it one step further and makes a point of having one-on-one meetings with each person in his team -– as well as the other party’s team! It gives him more control over their first impression of him, allowing him to be more authentic and strengthening relationships right off the bat.

Do not let humility become a clichéd word — make it personal. Reflect on your work life and relationships, giving some thought to how humility can improve them (or how it already does). It influences your work ethic, your ethics in terms of ethnicities, and the cohesion of your teams. Humility is an undercurrent seen only in the direction the ship is pulled. It is subtle, yet nuanced, and undoubtedly powerful.


Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. She founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can follow Olga on Twitter @olgavmack.

Woman Claiming To Be Harry Potter Kills Federal Judge In Hit-And-Run Crash

(Image via Getty)

We have some unfortunate news to report out of Boca Raton, Florida, where Judge Sandra Feuerstein of the Eastern District of New York, who was visiting the area, was killed after a woman who was driving erratically swerved her car onto the sidewalk, fatally striking the judge. A young boy was also injured.

Nastasia Snape, 23, has been charged with vehicular homicide and other felonies for the crash, and remains jailed on $60,000 bond. The Associated Press has additional details:

According to court records, witnesses told Boca Raton police the Snape was driving erratically, going around stopped traffic, on a busy road when she drove onto the sidewalk and struck Feuerstein. Snape then drove back onto the roadway, striking the boy in a crosswalk.

Police say Snape then fled into neighboring Delray Beach, where she crashed. A Delray police officer said Snape appeared to be having convulsions, but was able to get out of the car. She stared into space and would only say she was OK.

Police say that in the ambulance, Snape began screaming and fighting with medics while yelling she is Harry Potter. The medics drugged her. Police say they found in her purse the synthetic drug commonly known as “bath salts,” which can cause psychotic episodes.

Feuerstein, a 1979 graduate of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush in 2003. Her “eccentric style and warm personality lit up the courtroom,” said Eugene Corcoran, the Eastern District’s executive. “She will be missed by her colleagues and litigants alike.” Mark Lesko, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District, tweeted, “As we mourn her tragic death, we also remember Judge Feuerstein’s unwavering commitment to justice and service to the people of our district and our nation.”

We here at Above the Law would like to extend our condolences to Judge Sandra Feuerstein’s family, friends, and colleagues during this extremely difficult time.

Hit-and-run crash in Florida kills New York federal judge [Associated Press]


Staci ZaretskyStaci 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.