Tag: Law Firm Pro Bono

How should we treat our pro bono hours? Traditionally, as an incentive and motivator for attorneys to participate in pro bono, the gold standard was for law firms to treat time spent on pro bono matters the same as time spent on billable matters. At firms with billable hour requirements, pro bono matters would count towards reaching hourly goals. However, we have recently seen a trend of firms of moving away from the billable hour as a tool to evaluate performance of attorneys by either minimizing their importance or doing away with billable hours altogether. For firms that are distancing

Here we go again.  In early June, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy*† announcedthat it was increasing starting salaries to $190,000.  (Law firms made significant changes to the associate compensation scale in 2007, just prior to the Great Recession, and in 1999, in advance of the dot-com crash.)  Predictably, Milbank’s move triggered similar raises with firms announcing matching (or more generous) compensation scales, even raising the salaries for their summer associates who just arrived from law schools.  This pattern may continue, as “salary wars” are once again being waged at major law firms across the United States. As of now, decisions about compensation are still