NY to 200k?! Forum

[Anonymous User]

I realize it's gone off the rails since then, but the post that started this whole prestige discussion was using it as a proxy for who's likely to make salary moves. I think we can all agree "where do rising 2Ls at NYU want to practice" is not a useful metric for answering that question.

You’d be surprised by how much that is true. At Cleary Gottlieb, the number of law grads from schools below HLS, CLS and NYU has gone up a lot and it has caused enormous concern amongst the partnership. Cleary is an incredibly school snobby firm, and traditionally cared more about which school you went to than your grades at UVA. The tippy top schools are what the clients paying $1,100/hour for an associate — who themselves are Ivy grads — want to see.

How many people are they hiring that are 6'0 or taller?

[LBJ's Hair]

personally, I make most of my life decisions based on what will impress rising 2Ls at NYU.

my GF is (non-URM) double-Harvard, I clerked COA, my friends all went to T6s, and I work at one of the most selective law firms in the United States. I'm out of the running for SCOTUS, unfortunately. it took me awhile to accept that; I was thinking about doing a second COA with one of the Trump judges. (I'm not conservative, BTW, but that seemed like the best path to SCOTUS -- it's a 6-3 court!)

ultimately, I decided against that. I didn't want to clerk in a shitty flyover state, and my GF was upset when I told her about my plan. (she didn't clerk SCOTUS either, BTW, it bothers her too.) I had to unsubscribe from OSCAR for awhile, because it made me so upset to see emails with feeder openings and think about my classmates getting those clerkships and not me.

anyway, it's funny that people even pay attention to these compensation moves. everyone's gonna match. what matters is prestige. Cravath has it. DPW has it. S&C has it. And Milbank doesn't. Kirkland doesn't have it. (Except for their appeals group, with Paul Clement -- he's a great lawyer.) Skadden doesn't have it either, even though they think they do. that's probably what Kirkland will look like in a few years -- a has been, hiring some T6 students, and a lot of students from places like Fordham. (ew)

if you work at a not-prestigious firm and went to Vanderbilt, that's fine. maybe you get your 1.2x market bonus. maybe you do some big deals.

but when you go back to OCI at NYU and Columbia, remember: those law students, they wanna work at my law firm, not yours. they feel sorry for you. they're impressed with me. and that's what counts.

/s

[Anonymous User]

Jest aside - do PW, STB, GDC have “it”?

[ExpOriental]

I realize it's gone off the rails since then, but the post that started this whole prestige discussion was using it as a proxy for who's likely to make salary moves. I think we can all agree "where do rising 2Ls at NYU want to practice" is not a useful metric for answering that question.

You’d be surprised by how much that is true. At Cleary Gottlieb, the number of law grads from schools below HLS, CLS and NYU has gone up a lot and it has caused enormous concern amongst the partnership. Cleary is an incredibly school snobby firm, and traditionally cared more about which school you went to than your grades at UVA. The tippy top schools are what the clients paying $1,100/hour for an associate — who themselves are Ivy grads — want to see.

Indeed, we can observe this problem with Kirkland, which is notorious for its meager profits and low client demand.

(Except for their appeals group, with Paul Clement -- he's a great lawyer.)

Thank god this is finally settled.

[legalpotato]

Anonymous in-house dude says you all should feel ashamed.

https://abovethelaw.com/2021/06/tone-de ... ary-hikes/

lol greedy associates should feel ashamed about cutting into PPP.

Also, love the use of the anon source. I interpret "general counsel of a financial services company" as someone at ATL trying to balance his/her checkbook being salty.

Lol, ATL doesn't actually have GC sources, anonymous or otherwise. They are just quoting a Law.com article.

But yes, you should feel ashamed. If your firm matches, the only right thing to do is send a check for the difference to your clients.

Actually just set myself up as a client and will be remitting the $15/20k to the firm so it doesn't hurt PPP.

[louislittmbajdesq]

personally, I make most of my life decisions based on what will impress rising 2Ls at NYU.

my GF is (non-URM) double-Harvard, I clerked COA, my friends all went to T6s, and I work at one of the most selective law firms in the United States. I'm out of the running for SCOTUS, unfortunately. it took me awhile to accept that; I was thinking about doing a second COA with one of the Trump judges. (I'm not conservative, BTW, but that seemed like the best path to SCOTUS -- it's a 6-3 court!)

ultimately, I decided against that. I didn't want to clerk in a shitty flyover state, and my GF was upset when I told her about my plan. (she didn't clerk SCOTUS either, BTW, it bothers her too.) I had to unsubscribe from OSCAR for awhile, because it made me so upset to see emails with feeder openings and think about my classmates getting those clerkships and not me.

anyway, it's funny that people even pay attention to these compensation moves. everyone's gonna match. what matters is prestige. Cravath has it. DPW has it. S&C has it. And Milbank doesn't. Kirkland doesn't have it. (Except for their appeals group, with Paul Clement -- he's a great lawyer.) Skadden doesn't have it either, even though they think they do. that's probably what Kirkland will look like in a few years -- a has been, hiring some T6 students, and a lot of students from places like Fordham. (ew)

if you work at a not-prestigious firm and went to Vanderbilt, that's fine. maybe you get your 1.2x market bonus. maybe you do some big deals.

but when you go back to OCI at NYU and Columbia, remember: those law students, they wanna work at my law firm, not yours. they feel sorry for you. they're impressed with me. and that's what counts.

/s

Good attempt at satire, but Cravath and S&C don't have any presftige with COA clerkship-chasing lit gunner class. These people are going for top DC shops (W&C etc), elite boutiques, and top lit shops in each region (Susman in Houston, Keker in Bay area, GDC in Dallas, Munger in LA, Bondurant in Atlanta, Bartlitt in Chicago so on). Corporate's different I guess, but go through the lit rosters at Cravath and other New York biglaw, and you don't see a lot of clerkship sycophant-types.

[Anonymous User]

This is insufferable. This thread is for reporting on firm salary updates.

[LBJ's Hair]

Good attempt at satire, but Cravath and S&C don't have any presftige with COA clerkship-chasing lit gunner class. These people are going for top DC shops (W&C etc), elite boutiques, and top lit shops in each region (Susman in Houston, Keker in Bay area, GDC in Dallas, Munger in LA, Bondurant in Atlanta, Bartlitt in Chicago so on). Corporate's different I guess, but go through the lit rosters at Cravath and other New York biglaw, and you don't see a lot of clerkship sycophant-types.

you raise some interesting points, louis. i'm working on my definitive, geographic-agnostic rankings. David Lat and I will be releasing them early next week

[Anonymous User]

.

[clorox]

the amount of satire being taken seriously on this site is insane

[Anonymous User]

I get it, but I'm still amazed each time a firm matches the weird stub year salary that DPW just invented.

[Anonymous User]

Getting back on topic, are we giving up hope on another raise? Or will STB or Cravath come through?

[louislittmbajdesq]

If I were Kirkland, I would just go to $230K and create permanent market separation in the perception of preftige-conscious law students. Obviously won't happen though, and doesn't necessarily make sense financially since their strategy of targeting mid-levels with massive bonuses has been working really well for them.

[LBJ's Hair]

Getting back on topic, are we giving up hope on another raise? Or will STB or Cravath come through?

in all seriousness -- hard to imagine Cravath wanting to push junior compensation even further w/the year they had (PPP/RPL more or less flat). think they're just hoping they can match DPW and feel good about it. dunno about STB

[Untitleddestiny]

I could see Quinn raising just to mess with people

[Anonymous User]

If I were Kirkland, I would just go to $230K and create permanent market separation in the perception of preftige-conscious law students. Obviously won't happen though, and doesn't necessarily make sense financially since their strategy of targeting mid-levels with massive bonuses has been working really well for them.

They totally could too. They won't. But they could. God that would be a fucking power move.

[Ultramar vistas]

How did Wachtell’s unique position in the market start, historically?

Like, they get treated in many ways as any other large NY law firm for prestige purposes, and not as a boutique (I.e, they don’t get dinged for being a smaller firm like Susman or W&C does in the vault rankings).

But for compensation, the rest of the market just ignores what Wachtell does as irrelevant (do we even know what their base salary is anymore?) and makes no attempt to match their base or bonus. Weren’t they paying 170k when everyone else was paying 160k? How did they manage to be market leaders in base salary by a reasonably small amount? If Cravath or K&E tried to set up 10-15k ahead of everyone else, it would pull the whole market (including Wachtell) up, but Wachtell seems immune from that.

[Anonymous User]

the amount of satire being taken seriously on this site is insane

this profession is the worst lmao. don't all the bankers who we service look down on us anyway? what's all the fuss about prestige about?

[Anonymous User]

I get it, but I'm still amazed each time a firm matches the weird stub year salary that DPW just invented.

Can you imagine being the person who came up with this at DPW? This was probably the direct result of a single well-liked maverick that came up with an idea that nobody at DPW cared to argue against (presumably without consulting their payroll/accounting teams) and now the biglaw industry writ large is changing its actual tiers of compensation to adjust because it’s such a minor, insignificant change that nobody bothers to up it.

[Anonymous User]

McDermott has upped the raise it announced yesterday to match DPW's scale.

[Moneytrees]

The people claiming that Kirkland and Latham or not on DPW's level are either trolling or are relying far too much on NYC's conception of prestige. Get real.

I live in Manhattan, btw.

[Yardbird]

The people claiming that Kirkland and Latham or not on DPW's level are either trolling or are relying far too much on NYC's conception of prestige. Get real.

I live in Manhattan, btw.

They are likely people who have never actually worked for a firm or had client interactions (read: law students or new attorneys).

Clients hire firms based on past work done for them or other similarly sized companies/firms or because of a specific partner. Clients do not care (and I highly doubt if they even check to see) what law school the associates on the team went to or what the associate make up of the firm is. See Chambers for actual “prestige” of firms in different practice groups in different markets. Vault, TLS and ATL are all pointless rankings. To make grand statements like X firm isn’t as prestigious as Y firm is stupid when they are regarded as the best in the world practice group A and practice group B respectively and have the profits, revenues and deal flow to back it up.

[Kirkland230K]

If I were Kirkland, I would just go to $230K and create permanent market separation in the perception of preftige-conscious law students. Obviously won't happen though, and doesn't necessarily make sense financially since their strategy of targeting mid-levels with massive bonuses has been working really well for them.

They totally could too. They won't. But they could. God that would be a fucking power move.

I hereby dedicate my username to this noble cause. In the words of Emperor Palpatine - "Do it!"

[Monochromatic Oeuvre]

Jest aside - do PW, STB, GDC have “it”?

If you have to ask...

[Moneytrees]

The people claiming that Kirkland and Latham or not on DPW's level are either trolling or are relying far too much on NYC's conception of prestige. Get real.

I live in Manhattan, btw.

They are likely people who have never actually worked for a firm or had client interactions (read: law students or new attorneys).

Clients hire firms based on past work done for them or other similarly sized companies/firms or because of a specific partner. Clients do not care (and I highly doubt if they even check to see) what law school the associates on the team went to or what the associate make up of the firm is. See Chambers for actual “prestige” of firms in different practice groups in different markets. Vault, TLS and ATL are all pointless rankings. To make grand statements like X firm isn’t as prestigious as Y firm is stupid when they are regarded as the best in the world practice group A and practice group B respectively and have the profits, revenues and deal flow to back it up.

I agree that clients generally do not care about where the faceless associates they tangentially interact with went to law school. However, there are definitely practicing lawyers in NYC who think Debevoise is more prestigious than GD or Kirkland solely because its an old school NYC white shoe firm.