Bonuses to get hired by big US or UK law firms have hit record highs in 2021. Times are tougher now and employers are instead scrambling to get rid of staff, according to top recruiters in the industry.
– Payments to junior lawyers for signing an employment contract or committing to stay with the firm have since late 2022 more or less disappeared, Michelle Fivel of Major, Lindsey & Africa tells the Financial Times.
The recruitment firm finds employees for many of the top 200 international law firms.
– We are not dealing with a crazy market, as was the case in 2021, she specifies, and adds:
– Then the companies had to do it. Competitors did, and they were sure they would lose candidates if they didn’t give such bonuses.
Huge sums
Bounties peaked in 2021, when Kirkland & Ellis, the world’s most profitable law firm, offered $250,000, or more than NOK 2.5 million, to lawyers who received other offers employment.
Another company offered bonuses of $100,000, or one million crowns. Two other US law firms, Paul Hastings and Goodwin Procter, offered bonuses of $50,000 and $30,000, respectively, to lawyers who could recommend new partners, according to Fivel.
A Thomson Reuters Institute survey released last month found that US attorneys were billing fewer hours than they had in decades during the year through the end of November 2022. The number of lawyers changing jobs also fell sharply.
This stands in stark contrast to the rush to 2022 when a UK company paid a star employee $250,000 to drop an American rival and big US companies in London paid ‘sign on’ bonuses of up to $200,000. at $120,000.(Conditions)Copyright Dagens Næringsliv AS and/or our suppliers. We would like you to share our cases using links, which lead directly to our pages. Copying or other forms of use of all or part of the content may only take place with written permission or as permitted by law. For more terms see here.
