Associate Salaries - Start Low, End High, Build a Great Place to Work
Posted By Rob Millard - 0 Comments -
Yesterday I wrote of the enormous gap in starting salaries between lawyers following career paths in large commercial law firms, and "the rest." I suggested that some commercial law firms may seek to recruit entry level talent from the stream of graduates heading for the lower, left hand peak in the graph. Here is a post from the Wall Street Journal law blog about a firm, 50 attorney New York based Duval & Strachenveld, that is doing exactly that. Graduates are paid $60,000 a year, with the promise that those who shape up will catch up to their peers in 'Biglaw' firms within a few years, once they've proved themselves.
This strategy attracts attract top-tier students from second-tier schools and second-tier students from top-tier schools. Given that neither the school one attends nor the marks that one achieves are by any means the sole indicators of later success in practice, the results speak for themselves. About half make it through to the big bump in pay.
The front page of their website reads:
We have built our firm around a central theme of treating our lawyers extremely well.
We have learnt that if we treat our lawyers superbly they will treat our clients even better.
We intend to continue with this extremely simple business model as it has been working quite well so far.
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