Quinn Forum

[Anonymous User]

Regarding minimal management: does Quinn do reviews?

Yes but they are VERY perfunctory and do not affect compensation.

What are hours like? (someone considering an offer)

You need to hit 2100 to get a full bonus. I’ve billed around 2150 most years, except for one outlier year where I went to multiple trials and hit 2400.

2400 with multiple trials? Did you also take multiple months off?

To be clear, it was 2 trials that year and I didn’t take months off—just some slower months mixed in with vacations here and there to balance out the busy seasons.

[Anonymous User]

Former QE associate here. My hours ranged from 2150-2400 per year, including up to ~100 for pro bono. Pay was generally a bit above market because of 2021 special bonus hour bumps above 2200, annual bonus hour bumps above 2400, and retention bonuses vesting after a certain number of years at the firm.

The vitriol in this thread feels misplaced. QE has a strong roster of partners across pretty much every area of litigation. If you want to learn to learn to be a general litigator, I don't think there are many better places apart from the top boutiques. And QE does a good job of giving associates meaningful opportunities if they want them--probably a bit less so than a shop like Susman, but definitely better than the usual v15 firms that I've been across.

Internally, I found most people quite pleasant to work with and appreciated the lack of formality and rigid hierarchies--people don't really care where or how you're working as long as the work is done well. I have no insight into how QE came across from the other side, but the positions we took never struck me as unusually aggressive. Nor do I think our tone was ever out of line in comparison to the other side's, but it may just be that I worked with more reasonable partners. Most of QE's work product seemed quite good in comparison to peer firms. I wished certain partners wouldn't save everything for the last minute (and I think the work product would have been better for it), but I suspect that tendency exists across firms.

I had never heard of exit options being limited for anyone because of QE's negative reputation, and didn't encounter that when I left. The options I had were roughly commensurate with my non-QE qualifications, and maybe slightly better than they would have been had I gotten fewer stand up opportunities while litigating at one of the larger v15 firms.