The American law firm Susman Godfrey is surpassing Big Law’s most recent bonus scale, with associate bonuses ranging from $140,000 to $360,000. Alongside these generous bonuses, associates are also set to receive salary raises, matching the new salary scale that begins at $225,000 for first-year associates, reveals a memo acquired by
Bloomberg Law.
Vineet Bhatia and Kalpana Srinivasan, the firm’s managing partners, attribute these increases to an exceptional moment in the firm’s history. “We are in a truly extraordinary moment in the 40-plus year history of the firm, with our highest-ever revenue and a record number of cases tried over the last year and a half.”
The increases may be in response to the increasing competition among firms to attract the profession’s leading talent. Previous months saw the likes of Cravath, Swaine & Moore
raise base salaries for their first three classes of junior litigators. Notably, other prominent firms such as Paul Weiss, Cleary Gottlieb, and Dechert have felt compelled to
match this new scale.
With considerably smaller associate pools, boutique law firms can typically afford higher per-associate expenditures, often surpassing the pay scales of larger firms. For instance, Susman Godfrey— a litigation boutique with a total of 170 lawyers— achieved its largest ever defamation settlement of $787.5 million this past year, representing Dominion Voting Systems Inc against Fox Corp. over alleged false news surrounding the 2020 US presidential election, as
reported by Bloomberg Law.
Beyond Susman Godfrey, other boutique litigators are also providing substantial end-of-year bonuses. Wilkinson Stekloff, for example, will be offering bonuses of up to $201,250 to its senior associates this December. Similarly, New York-based Holwell Shuster & Goldberg is aligning with the new Cravath scale, and Massumi + Consoli LLP plans to implement salary increases in January, according to their respective internal memos.