Exclusive: £10k increase for firm’s newly qualified lawyers
Macfarlanes has bumped up the pay cheques of its newly-qualified (NQ) solicitors by a hefty £10,000.
Junior lawyers at the firm had enjoyed a respectable £71,000 salary rate. As of this month, they can expect to earn at least £81,300. This equates to a 15% pay boost.
The new NQ pay band, which has a base rate of £75,000 and factors in salary plus potential bonuses, stretches to a whopping £90,000. This includes a firm-wide bonus of at least 5%, which NQs can expect to receive in October. With a 100% retention rate for solicitors qualifying in March, Macfarlanes’ trainees are probably popping the champagne.
And if you’re really good, you could net even more. Potentially, the top Macfarlanes rookies could pocket an extra bonus of up to 10% of their salary if they can demonstrate “exceptional performance”, whatever that might mean. Not a bad incentive for the fee-earners to reign in more business for the firm.
The news comes as Macfarlanes unveils a strong set of financial results that have seen average profit per equity partner (PEP) rise by nearly 8% to £1.38 million and revenue move up by nearly 4% to £167.6 million.
Macfarlanes scored an A* in the 2016 Legal Cheek Trainee and Junior Lawyer Survey for training, while it bagged As for quality of work and peer support. But it’s a hard-working place: according to our data, on average trainees and junior associates leave the office at 7:51pm, having started work at 9:04am — which seems to reasonably reflect their sizeable pay cheques.
Earlier today Legal Cheek announced another pay exclusive, revealing that the London office of US firm Jones Day had upped its NQ rate to £100,000.
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