{"id":262,"date":"2010-01-06T17:45:12","date_gmt":"2010-01-06T23:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/?p=262"},"modified":"2010-01-06T17:45:12","modified_gmt":"2010-01-06T23:45:12","slug":"first-year-associates-and-big-salaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/2010\/01\/06\/first-year-associates-and-big-salaries\/","title":{"rendered":"First Year Associates and Big Salaries"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an interesting article by Brenda Sapino Jeffries in a recent <em>Texas Lawyer,<\/em> &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.law.com\/jsp\/tx\/PubArticleTX.jsp?id=1202436265490\" target=\"_blank\">Gardere Reduces First-Year Salaries and Billable Hours<\/a>&#8220;.\u00a0 The Dallas-based, 275-lawyer firm, Gardere Wynne Sewell is cutting first-year salaries form $140,000 to $120,000 (about 14%) and first-year billable hours from 2000 to 1700 (15%).\u00a0 The rationale is that clients were starting to specify in engagement letters that <em>no first-year lawyers could be assigned <\/em>to the matter.\u00a0 The associates will also get about 300 hours of <em>training:<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;I just think we are getting more focused. You understand you have an investment in these people and they get the right type of training,&#8221; [managing partner Steve] Good says, noting that training will include classroom sessions and more opportunity for the first-year lawyers to observe trials, depositions and negotiating sessions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The problem?\u00a0 Clients don&#8217;t want to pay for training:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[Stephen] Mims [Prescott Legal Search] says he has spoken to a number of general counsel who complain that many first-year associates are not prepared for the job when coming out of law school and would benefit from more training. Gardere&#8217;s plan addresses that client concern, he says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Some have speculated that the economic downturn has accentuated the problems inherent in the traditional Big-Firm model of practice.\u00a0 We&#8217;ll need to see\u00a0many\u00a0more\u00a0swallows before we can tell if it&#8217;s Spring in Capistrano.<\/p>\n<p><em>posted by Gary Rosin<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an interesting article by Brenda Sapino Jeffries in a recent Texas Lawyer, &#8220;Gardere Reduces First-Year Salaries and Billable Hours&#8220;.\u00a0 The Dallas-based, 275-lawyer firm, Gardere Wynne Sewell is cutting first-year salaries form $140,000 to $120,000 (about 14%) and first-year billable hours from 2000 to 1700 (15%).\u00a0 The rationale is that clients were starting to specify [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions\/264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uberlaw.net\/LawNumbers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}