Author: TSA Press

More and more firms are getting in on the special bonus action. After over a year of pandemic life, Biglaw is showing love for the associates (and their billable hours) that make the success of the industry all possible.

Today, Fried Frank, a firm that place 56th on the Am Law 200 thanks to $776,000,000 in gross revenue in 2019, announced its own special bonuses. As expected for such an elite firm, they’re matching the standard set by Davis Polk.

At Fried Frank, the two special bonus payments are split equally, which is a nice touch. The billable-hour threshold for the bonuses is 1850, annualized, and associates who miss out on the first payment have an opportunity to catch up if they bill the requisite hours in the back half of the year.

This is how the payments break down at the firm:

The firm also noted these are in addition to year-end bonuses, which they expect to be the same size as last year’s annual bonuses.

You can read the firm’s full memo on the next page.

Please help us help you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

A big upset this week brings a little drama to the Final Four. And we’ve finally got a genuine challenge for our top-seeded cat filter.

We’re headed to an exciting finish next week.

We’ll run this round until Monday, April 5 at 9:00 a.m.

(1) Lawyer Tells Judge ‘I’m Not A Cat’ In The Best Zoom Court Mishap Yet vs. (4) Yep, That’s A Lawyer Having Sex On Camera During A Hearing!: Lawyer cat continues to roll through the tournament, but is he ready for a lawyer going at it during a criminal hearing?

(2) Jeffrey Toobin Makes A Great Poi–OH MY GOD, HIS DICK’S OUT!!! vs. (6) Man Attends Zoom Court Hearing From His Victim’s Home, Gets Arrested: Down goes the Supreme Court flush! The highest toilet in the land got upset by the scary story of an abuser intimidating a victim during testimony. Now it faces a genuine showdown with Jeffrey Toobin’s master stroke of a Zoom meeting.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

April Fools’ Day is just around the corner, but this Magic Circle firm isn’t fooling when it comes to its special bonuses. After a little bit of controversy, it looks like Clifford Chance will be matching the latest round of special bonuses after all.

The firm announced this morning that it would be matching the Davis Polk scale, and making payments on June 30 and December 30 (a bit late, but it’ll make for an especially magical new year). Here’s what the scale looks like at Clifford Chance (full memo available on the next page):

It doesn’t look like these bonuses are specifically tied to hours, but instead, will be “based upon an assessment of each associate’s overall performance, including quality of work, contribution to the Firm, teamwork and pro bono efforts.” Congratulations to everyone at Clifford Chance!

(Flip to the next page to see the full memo from Clifford Chance.)

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus updates, so when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for all of your help!

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Biglaw bonus season is in full swing! The industry doesn’t usually have bonus announcements in the spring, but once Willkie announced special bonuses and Davis Polk’s scale came over the top, well, a full-on bonus war began. And we have yet another major law firm handing out spring bonuses.

Cadwalader has announced its participation in the spring special bonus frenzy. But when you dig into the details, well, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

First, the good news: the firm is paying market rate for special bonuses, which, they’ve clarified, are in additional to normal year-end bonuses. Plus the firm dragged their feet in announcing the last round of special bonuses in 2020, so in the words of one tipster, “after waiting for months to hear about a covid bonus in 2020 and then not getting a full market match, I am just happy CWT matched at all!”

But there is bad news too. The payment dates for the special bonus are July of 2021 and February of 2022. This is the first firm to push special payment dates into next year — an ignominious distinction, to be sure. Plus they have the highest stated hours requirement thus far — 2000 hours, annualized — to be eligible for the bonus payments. But on the up side, associates who don’t hit the hours threshold for the July payment, but do by year end, will receive the full payment in February.

In any event, here is the firm’s bonus scale:

You can read the firm’s full memo on the next page.

Please help us help you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

It’s not particularly surprising that Winston & Strawn will join the market in offering special bonuses. This one is a JSESDPWM (June-September Equal Split DPW Match). But what is surprising is a line tucked away at the bottom of the memo promising some even more exciting news at year-end.

Winston matches the market rate for annual bonuses every year, but has historically kicked a bit more into the annual bonus pool for high billers. Back in 2019, this amounted to around $5K for 2200 hours and $7.5K for 2400. This special bonus memo concludes by announcing, “we are pleased to announce that we are significantly increasing our year-end high hours bonuses.” That’s a tantalizing promise to drop on associates finishing up their first quarter of billing!

But we’ll have to wait to see what Winston’s going to offer next. For now, we’ve got June and September bonuses to think about.

Bonuses are available to associates hitting a 1900-hour annualized target — folks missing out in June have the opportunity to catch up. Congrats to all and we’re looking forward to more news about these high-biller bonuses!

Full memo on the next page…

Please help us help you when it comes to bonus news at other firms. As soon as your firm’s bonus memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts, please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

As days go by, more and more Biglaw firms are getting in on the special bonus action, and now a UK-based firm has decided to make money magically appear in its associates’ bank accounts. That’s right, a member of the Magic Circle is now handing out special bonus bucks to its associates, but which firm could it be?

Abracadabra! It’s Freshfields! Yesterday, the firm matched the generous Davis Polk scale, and issuing payments in April and October. Check out what it looks like at the firm, below (full memo available on the next page):

Counsel are included in these bonuses, but exact amounts will be communicated individually. As another plus, it doesn’t seem like there are any billable-hour thresholds attached to these bonuses. Congratulations!

P.S. Now that one Magic Circle firm has entered the special bonus fray, will others — like Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, and Linklaters — opt to join in all the fun? We’re specifically looking at you, Clifford Chance.

(Flip to the next page to see the full memo from Freshfields.)

Remember everyone, we depend on your tips to stay on top of important bonus updates, so when your firm matches, please text us (646-820-8477) or email us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Matches”). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.

And if you’d like to sign up for ATL’s Bonus Alerts (which is the alert list we also use for salary announcements), please scroll down and enter your email address in the box below this post. If you previously signed up for the bonus alerts, you don’t need to do anything. You’ll receive an email notification within minutes of each bonus announcement that we publish. Thanks for all of your help!

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Goldman Sachs has called a class-action lawsuit against it “the most important securities case” to come before the U.S. Supreme Court in years. Well, having heard arguments over it, the nation’s most august jurists aren’t so sure.

* A lawsuit alleging that a company conspired to fix the price of pork has settled. Guess their actions didn’t sound kosher and they were allegedly acting piggish… [Meat+Poultry]

* Check out this profile of a retired lawyer who found a new calling as a writer. [Post and Courier]

* Bigelow Aerospace is suing NASA for around a million dollars for purportedly not paying for work. That number doesn’t seem out of this world… [CBS News]

* Representatives of Dominion Voting Systems have not ruled out suing President Trump over remarks he made over alleged fraud in the 2020 election. [Independent]

* Since Above the Law has not had a “lawyerly lairs” segment in a while, wanted to relate that a well-known Chicago attorney is selling his posh mansion. [Crain’s Chicago Business]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

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Ed. Note: Welcome to our daily feature Trivia Question of the Day!

What law school ranked in the top 14 in the 2022 US News and World Report Ranking has the lowest average amount of student debt?

Hint: For the first time, USNWR included average law school debt as a component of their rankings. This law school impressed with a combination of great academics and average debt of $125,167.

See the answer on the next page.