For the nearly 37,000 graduates who stepped out of American law schools this spring, the most talked about legal decision of the year had nothing to do with the Supreme Court. It was the bombshell dropped last April by the elite New York City law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. By the addition of a $12,000 "housing allowance," Cravath pushed its starting salary to a stratospheric $65,000 a year. Equal or larger increases went to junior lawyers already on the Cravath payroll.
The move jolted the legal profession, especially the expanding megafirms that compete with Cravath for a relatively stable pool of top graduates. In recent weeks a ripple effect has pushed up salaries at major firms across the country. All of this is good news for young associates, the entry-level lawyers who toil for five to nine years in the hope of joining the full partners, who split a firm's profits. But as the new lawyers are just now discovering, this silver lining comes with a cloud. At the big firms that pay those high salaries, associates commonly work at uninspiring tasks, poring over old court decisions and statute books, then drafting memos for the higher-ups. Rarely meeting clients or standing up to argue in court, they dig again and again into the same tiny areas of cases they never approach as a whole. Above all, they work punishing hours. Personal lives go by the wayside as they put in 70-hour weeks, struggling to bill clients for anywhere from 2,000 to 2,500 hours a year.
"After two or three years you figure out that you pay a price for that money," says Dennis Kendig, a partner in the modest-size Los Angeles firm of Sachs & Phelps. "You pay in quality of life." Hard work has always been a hallmark of the legal profession, and the reservoirs of public sympathy for well-paid attorneys are no doubt a trifle shallow. But even soaring salaries can seem a poor return for years spent on the assembly line of the law. The result: some large firms now commonly lose up to one-half of their associates. On Wall Street, for instance, many defect to investment banking, a field that lets them shape the deals they would merely flyspeck as lawyers and earn even more exorbitant salaries. Legal publications are filled with advice on how to soothe unhappy rookies. Business is booming for legal headhunters, who can charge $20,000 and more in fees to replace a single defector.
Straight out of Harvard Law School in 1981, Robert Jason accepted a $33,000 starting salary at O'Melveny & Myers, a Los Angeles-based firm with some 375 lawyers in offices on both coasts. Large firms appeal to clients in part by offering them expertise in minute and sometimes arcane legal specialties. Jason found himself assigned to municipal-bond tax law. "A total dead end," he now moans. Even worse, he maintains, at a large firm "associates do the absolute dregs of the work-- six months at a time in a warehouse looking through documents." Following an increasingly well-worn path, Jason fled his big firm in 1984 for a smaller shop, in his case the 32- lawyer firm of Hill Wynne Troop & Meisinger, where, he says, responsibility comes sooner. His conclusion: "All the stuff you put up with at the large firms is not worth it."