Reply to Biglaw Associate Raises

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "Biglaw Associate Raises"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Try and think of this from the client's perspective. (I am transactional, so doc production doesn't apply).

I have something that needs attending to. It would take a 4th year plus no more than 3 hours. So let's assume 700 an hour MAX. That's max 2100.

You guys assign it to a 1st year.

We have a first year and a senior meeting to assign the project. 1 hour. The two lawyers bill me a total of 1000 just to assign the work. Then the first year spend 8 hours figuring it out. Not dumb, just starting from zero. That's 3200 more. Then another couple hours for the senior to review and the first year to revise. Another 1500.

Now I have a 5700 dollar bill for something that should have cost me 2000 max.

How are you defending that?

And I pick and pay lawyers who provide value to me. So I am more likely to pick a senior associate or a mid over contacting a partner. It builds your book. [/quote]

I agree with you that the standard law firm model of "push the work down to the lowest hourly rate person who can do the work competently" is not always in the client's interest. Now that I'm fairly senior, there is rate compression at my level and the most prominent attorneys at my firm cost only a few hundred dollars more per hour than me. A client would be theoretically better off if they just did my work themselves. Fortunately for us, those partners are in far more demand than they have time, so they have leverage to tell clients that to hire them, they need to hire our team. Work that doesn't require their expertise we can't keep at our firm.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics