Vinson & Elkins has became the latest US firm to raise its London pay for newly-qualified solicitors to £100,000.
The hike represents a 25% rise for V&E NQs, who previously scraped by on just £80,000. 1PQEs will now be paid £110,000 (a 22% rise) and 2PQEs will take down £120,000 (a 20% rise). V&E's London Managing Partner Alex Msimang said, "these compensation changes, combined with our career development programmes, allow us to remain highly competitive in this market".
The pay hike means V&E will keep up with a growing band of £100K US firms. The group includes Davis Polk, Weil Gotshal which raised its NQ salary from £97,000 a fortnight ago and Akin Gump which made the move when it swallowed high-paying Bingham's London office in September 2014. Meanwhile, two other US firms pay their most junior solicitors even more: Latham & Watkins pays its NQs £101,000, while Sullivan & Cromwell's NQs are the most expensive in the country at £101,500.
V&E's move reinforces the pay gap between US firms and London's homegrown elite. Allen & Overy delighted staff earlier this year when, after years of trailing its Magic Circle peers, it dished out rises of over 25% and leapfrogged all of them, recasting its NQs as the best remunerated in the Magic Circle at £78,500. Although as long as US firms continue to take on tiny numbers of trainees (five per year at V&E versus 90 at A&O), the UK elite may continue to calculate that the US firms don't justify a pay war.
Lawyers who work just as hard as those at V&E and deserve more money, dammit, can have their say in the RollOnFriday Firm of the Year survey. Likewise, those at US firms can rate their pay as 'excellent' and also report on whether the same can be said for work/life balance.
Tip Off ROF
The hike represents a 25% rise for V&E NQs, who previously scraped by on just £80,000. 1PQEs will now be paid £110,000 (a 22% rise) and 2PQEs will take down £120,000 (a 20% rise). V&E's London Managing Partner Alex Msimang said, "these compensation changes, combined with our career development programmes, allow us to remain highly competitive in this market".
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It was the career development programmes that clinched it, oh yeah |
The pay hike means V&E will keep up with a growing band of £100K US firms. The group includes Davis Polk, Weil Gotshal which raised its NQ salary from £97,000 a fortnight ago and Akin Gump which made the move when it swallowed high-paying Bingham's London office in September 2014. Meanwhile, two other US firms pay their most junior solicitors even more: Latham & Watkins pays its NQs £101,000, while Sullivan & Cromwell's NQs are the most expensive in the country at £101,500.
V&E's move reinforces the pay gap between US firms and London's homegrown elite. Allen & Overy delighted staff earlier this year when, after years of trailing its Magic Circle peers, it dished out rises of over 25% and leapfrogged all of them, recasting its NQs as the best remunerated in the Magic Circle at £78,500. Although as long as US firms continue to take on tiny numbers of trainees (five per year at V&E versus 90 at A&O), the UK elite may continue to calculate that the US firms don't justify a pay war.
Lawyers who work just as hard as those at V&E and deserve more money, dammit, can have their say in the RollOnFriday Firm of the Year survey. Likewise, those at US firms can rate their pay as 'excellent' and also report on whether the same can be said for work/life balance.
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Many trainees will be carrying heavy debts from their studies
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And by the way, £75k to £100 is a 33% rise, not 25% rise.
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11/12/2015 09:36
I do enjoy coming here to read the bitter remarks from solicitors at regional firms. Usually unfounded, always amusing.
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I am a regional solicitor, high street in fact, and am not at all bitter at the salaries the NQ's get at US, Magic Circle firms or anywhere else for that matter. Never worked in anything remotely corporate/city etc and never want to, quite happy here in the sticks advising the rest of the plebs/hicks/hill billies about mud hut leases and easements over properties for those new fangled mechanical horses, 'cars' I think, and other such regional matters.
Seriously, those in the city shouldn't look to far down there noses at us regional bods as I wouldn't get out of bed for the kind of cash being quoted here (80,100,120, etc), but good luck to them at these kind of firms, working 18 hour days for not much money, having no life in one of the most expensive cities to live in on the planet.
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If there were a demand for premium quality domestic conveyancing, then doubtless the city firms would provide it. The unfortunate fact of life is that after telling a commercial client that there is no budging on £50k basic and time at £500 per hour, the solicitor gets his wife (or the nanny) to spend three days phoning round for the cheapest possible quote on domestic conveyancing. They then regale dinner parties with how they didn't get a 24 hour bespoke service from some poor sod struggling to cover the overheads at £450 a throw.
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