Biglaw, Courts

Elite Biglaw Firms Are Offering $400K Bonuses To Supreme Court Clerks

But have any firms decided to offer bonuses that are higher?

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Just how much is a former Supreme Court clerk worth? How much are Biglaw firms and prestigious boutiques willing to pay to woo associates with supreme intellect and inside insights about how the nation’s highest court operates and how certain justices think? Back in 2018, we reported that $400,000 was the prevailing rate for signing bonuses for former Supreme Court clerks. Yes, you read that correctly: former SCOTUS clerks were making almost double their Supreme bosses’ salaries in bonus money just for signing on the dotted line, on top of their base salaries and regular bonuses.

We know of several firms — off hand, those firms are Jones Day, Kirkland & Ellis, Orrick, Paul Weiss, Skadden Arps, Gibson Dunn, and Susman Godfrey — that have offered $400,000 bonuses to their SCOTUS clerk recruits in the past. Two years later and with the economic upheaval of a pandemic to deal with, has anything changed?

According to Michael Scanlon, hiring partner at Gibson Dunn, “the signals that we’ve seen to date indicate that the market remains at a $400,000 bonus level.” In this morning’s Supreme Court Brief, a National Law Journal newsletter, Tony Mauro provided the following evidence about how the $400K bonus has persisted:

> Kathryn Mizelle, a 2018-2019 clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas who has been nominated to a district court judgeship in Florida, reported in her financial disclosure form that she received $400,000 as a hiring bonus in 2019 from Jones Day, the firm that has harvested dozens of clerks in recent years. For 2020, at least the months up to the filing, her salary at Jones Day was identified as $333,333. Court filings in a discrimination suit against Jones Day show a Supreme Court clerk bonus in 2017 was $350,000.

> In August Michael Francisco, said to be the first clerk from the 2019-2020 class to start working at a firm, also acknowledged that the market has been steady. “Clerks are getting hired at pretty traditional places, in pretty traditional numbers,” Francisco told NLJ. “I don’t particularly care to be talking about compensation and money, but in the general sense, the market hasn’t changed very much.” Francisco is a partner at McGuireWoods in Washington.

> If there are bonus fluctuations, one reason may be a growing trend among Supreme Court clerks, said Carter Phillips, the Sidley Austin partner and longtime appellate advocate. More and more are working at law firms before they clerk at the Supreme Court, he said. “Those people will feel like ‘lateral’ associates to some law firms and my guess is a lot of firms have a hiring freeze on lateral associates. That might explain some hiring issues.”

While the market seems to have settled at $400K, longtime appellate advocate Carter Phillips of Sidley Austin isn’t exactly thrilled about how high the bonuses have climbed. Phillips was one of the first lawyers to offer signing bonuses for Supreme Court clerks, and back in 1987, the bonus was just $10,000. He says the firm “learned the hard way” that offering an off-market bonus wouldn’t work for SCOTUS clerks, telling Mauro that “no one was willing to accept an offer with the lower bonus.”

Jones Day tends to corner the market on Supreme Court clerks each year, and Phillips made a wry comment about it in light of the expected six-figure bonuses. “Maybe Jones Day will successfully recruit 30 clerks this year. If so, God bless them,” he said. That would be $12,000,000 in signing bonuses alone for a group of new hires who may wind up taking the money and running after just a few years at the firm.

If you know that your firm is paying $400,000 for SCOTUS clerks (or more), email us (subject line: “SCOTUS Clerkship Bonuses”) or text us (646-820-8477), and we’ll compile a list of every firm that’s paying so generously for supreme talent.

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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.

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