Mayer Brown and Dechert boost NQ pay to £75k and £95k

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By Thomas Connelly on

Exclusive: London legal salaries keep rising

Global law firms Mayer Brown and Dechert have boosted the salaries of their junior lawyers, Legal Cheek can reveal.

Mayer Brown has confirmed that its London associates will now begin lawyer life on £75,000, up 5% from £71,500. Legal Cheek’s Firms Most List 2018 shows that Mayer Brown’s newbies are now £3,000 better off than their opposite numbers at Ashurst and Baker McKenzie, and £4,000 ahead of their peers at Simmons & Simmons and K&L Gates.

The firm, which offers around 15 training contracts annually, now joins a raft of outfits that dish out £75,000 to its new London recruits. These include DLA Piper, Hogan Lovells, Macfarlanes, Norton Rose Fulbright and Travers Smith.

Meanwhile, Dechert has confirmed that London NQ pay now stands at a hefty £95,000. Up from an already respectable £90,000, the increase equates to a rise of 6%. It places the firm between Jones Day (£100,000) and Clifford Chance (£87,300) in the NQ salary stakes.

Trainee pay at Dechert remains unchanged, with first years earning £45,000, rising to £50,000 in year two. Trainees at Mayer Brown have been handed extra cash. Until recently, aspiring lawyers in their first year of training earned a salary £42,000. Now, that’s up £1,000 to £43,000, a rise of 2%. This puts Mayer Brown’s year one trainees on a pay par with those at fellow international player Watson Farley & Williams, and magic circle trio Slaughter and May, Linklaters and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.

Meanwhile, second year trainee wedge has also been bumped by £1,000 to £48,000, again an uplift of 2%. Mayer Brown trainees now earn the same as second years at firms including Herbert Smith Freehills, Latham & Watkins and Ropes & Gray.

In further news, Legal Cheek can also reveal that Dechert has notched up an autumn retention score of just 50%. It has remained tightlipped over the exact details of this, however our Most List shows the firm takes on around ten trainees each year.

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