Biglaw

Salary Match, But Bonuses Delayed... Mwahaha, Now You Can NEVER Leave

When firms delay the summer bonus until the end of the year, you get what they're doing, right?

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Jenner & Block is on the Cravath salary corner. They’re out with a match of the salary scale.

Jenner & Block is one of the elite firms in Chicago, but they’re probably best known for their top-notch D.C. appellate practice.

The firm is matching salaries, but not the summer bonuses started off by Simpson Thacher. Instead, the firm said that they will consider that other firms have given out summer bonuses when it comes time to make end of the year payments.

As Kathryn Rubino has mentioned, delaying the midyear bonuses — sorry, delaying the possibility of midyear bonuses — until the end of the year has the effect of tying associates to the firm for the rest of the year, and realistically on into the next. Sure, comparatively few people leave their firms during the summer and fall, and the end of year bonuses is always there as an incentive to stay through another year.

But some associates do and now, if they do, they’re looking at missing out on an even bigger bonus, one that many of their colleagues have already earned.

At the very least, the time value of money here benefits the partners.

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It’s just another link of the golden handcuffs: Go up a class year and get a big raise at the start of the year, work for a few months, start thinking of leaving, start thinking about how much more money is waiting for you in December, hang on, go up a class year, rinse, repeat. It’s not bad or nefarious. It’s just the cycle of Biglaw.

Here’s the memo.

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 Salaries”). 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. Thanks!

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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