© 2015 The Texas Lawbook.
By Natalie Posgate
(Jan. 28) – Associate bonuses in Texas are starting to publicly surface.
Tuesday, Vinson & Elkins Chairman Mark Kelly sent out a firmwide memo announcing the bonus amounts the firm’s associates will receive for 2014, which he said will be in associates’ accounts by the end of the week.
According to the chart in Kelly’s memo, senior associates will receive as much as $120,000, and entry-level associates will receive as much as $20,000. Median bonuses for those categories were $110,000 and $10,000, respectively. The firm decided associate bonus amounts on a case-by-case basis.
Associates who joined the firm in 2014, however, will receive a flat rate of $3,750.
“Our most productive associates will receive bonuses at least commensurate with the New York scale,” Kelly wrote. “In some cases we will be paying higher, individualized bonuses to associates who had an extraordinary year, in terms of hours and personal performance.”
V&E’s bonus amounts, the first from a large Texas-based law firm to be in the public domain, match if not exceed most national or New York law firms that have announced their numbers already.
Latham & Watkins confirmed information about its bonuses that was published on legal blog Above the Law yesterday. According to a Jan. 23 memo, highest bonuses for junior level associates were mostly $5,000 more than those given out at V&E, but their highs for senior associates were about the same.
Latham’s bonuses are a large increase from last year’s numbers, and a significant boost from a few years ago. According to more information from Above the Law blog posts confirmed by Latham, the firm’s highest bonus for 2013 was $93,500, which is 28 percent lower than 2014’s high of $120,000.
Latham’s median bonus amounts for 2011 were almost half of what they are now. The median bonus for senior associates was $54,000; for 2014 it is $100,000.
Latham, like V&E, will pay associate bonuses at the end of this week, as will Weil, Gotshal & Manges, which announced its bonus amounts in November. Matching fellow New York firms Davis, Polk & Wardwell and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Weil will give its associates $15,000 to $100,000, depending on seniority. Associates in the class of 2005 or before were determined on a case-by-case basis, the memo said.
Most of the Texas litigation boutiques that The Texas Lawbook reached out to declined to disclose the amounts it awarded. However, John Zavitsanos of Houston-based Ahmad, Zavitsanos, Anaipakos Alavi & Mensing said the firm based its associate bonuses on the 2013 compensation structure, and is above what New York firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore awarded (which was between $10,000 and $60,000). Cravath has historically set the bar for compensation.
Zavitsanos said the bonuses AZA gave out for 2014, which he called a “record year” for the firm, were given out in early December. He said the amounts were “either the same or more” than previous years.
Bill Chamblee of the Dallas firm Chamblee Ryan, which has 17 associates and 27 attorneys in total, said the highest bonus he gave was $13,500.
“I’d say people are happy with what our firm gave in bonuses this year,” Chamblee said. “The Texas legal market right now is healthy, vibrant and probably better economically than it was five years ago.”
Randy Block, the owner of Dallas legal recruiting firm, Performance Legal Placement, said the associate bonuses on a national scope are so far looking more lucrative than previous years.
“It looks like across the board, everyone in the country paid bigger bonuses, and had bigger years in 2014 than they did in 2013,” Block said.
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