Gibson Dunn leads London NQ lawyer pay table with improved £180k salary

I don’t work at one of these US firms that pay insane salaries but I imagine most who are NQs – 3 PQE at them have no intention of staying long term.

I would happily work there and be breasted for 2-3 years, save and then f*** off to a region with a hefty amount of savings to invest.

Before anyone says cost of living, you can rent in London for roughly £700 PCM. Thats doable on a 45k salary let alone 180k.

I quite like my job, and think I have a good work/life balance for this stage in my career.

I’m young, I don’t mind working ~50-60h a week (particularly on good cases, which there’s plenty of).

Dare I say I even enjoy it most days.

Not so great when Reed Smith pay their lawyers NY rates in the US but pennies over here

Good luck paying your mortgage with ‘trusted boardroom advisor’

The constant refrain that Slaughter and May is an advisor to more FTSE companies than other law firms is quickly belied as irrelevant and weak when one actually examines its meaning. Since 2008, the UK and Europe more broadly have vastly underperformed the US economically. British companies are hardly leaders in any of the new sectors that American companies dominate – AI, semiconductors, software, electric vehicles, the list goes on. So the fact that Slaughter and May is an advisor to more FTSE companies is hardly a point of pride. Slaughter and May is heavily tied to this zombie of a country versus its American counterparts (like GDC, Skadden, etc) who can call companies like Nvidia, Meta, Google, Goldman, KKR, Microsoft etc their home clients. This much is reflected in the pay – Slaughters NQ salary of 125k is 70% of GDCs. And guess what – the gap widens at higher levels of associate. Some “prestige” Slaughter and May has – especially if that prestige is tied to the failing and increasingly irrelevant UK (where even its best companies refuse to list on the LSE and instead routinely snub it for the NASDAQ or NYSE).

One only needs to look at the composition of the London Stock Exchange to see it populated by last century’s firms – mining, tobacco, gambling – compared to the Nasdaq – which is populated by tech, biotech, AI companies – to see what serving more FTSE companies actually means. If I were an NQ looking at any of the trends clearly, I would avoid a company like Slaughters, which proudly claims its irrelevance with its non competitive pay and ties to the UK market, with a wide berth.

Who giz a shizzle? Honestly show me the money! I’d belly dance in snow for that much! I’m serious!

Please. Companies that instruct MC or US firms have deep pockets. They can pay too fees for the top tier service or settle for subpar advice or risk losing giant litigations.

Associates should push for more pay. No need to concern themselves with whether clients can pay. Not their problem! Either the partners need to share more of the pie or clients need to cough up the money.

Always easy to spot a fresher. You will soon realise that the MC and SC promise of training is literally a series of PowerPoints and presentations that you will never remember once you start doing the actual work. Most of your key skills will be learned on the job. 99% of being a good training is attention to detail, motivation and enthusiasm – a few weeks here or there being trained in private equity won’t teach you that.