A managing partner called me on a Sunday afternoon in November 2023, and he did not bother with hello. He said, “Milbank went first again,” and then he exhaled like a man who had just watched someone else spend his money. He was right to be annoyed. Within about seventy-two hours the top of the market had a new first-year number, $225,000, and every recruiter I know spent the following week doing the same math on the same napkins.
I have placed partners for twenty years. I read compensation tables the way some people read racing forms. The salary scale is the boring part, honestly. The interesting part is who moves first, who matches at 5 p.m. on a Friday, and who waits three weeks and pretends the delay was strategy rather than a fight in the executive committee.
Let me tell you what the $225k scale actually says, because it is not mostly about the associates.
who holds the pen
For decades the ritual was simple. Cravath, Swaine & Moore set the number, everyone matched, and the profession pretended this was coincidence rather than the most efficient wage-fixing that never gets prosecuted. Cravath moved first-years to $160,000 back in the day, then to $180,000 in 2016, then to $190,000 in 2018. That was the natural order.
Then Milbank started grabbing the pen.
Milbank went to $190,000 in 2018 before Cravath had said a word that year, and the shock of it was less about the dollars than about the audacity. A firm that was very good but not, in the old caste system, a scale-setter, decided it would set the scale. In June 2021, coming out of the pandemic deal frenzy, Milbank did it again, taking first-years to $200,000. Davis Polk answered within days and pushed the top higher. Cravath, the old king, matched a number it had not chosen.
January 2022, Milbank again. First-years to $215,000, the senior classes stretched up toward $415,000. And in November 2023, the raise that gave us the scale we still live with: $225,000 for the class fresh off the bar, climbing through the eighth year to roughly $435,000.
Here is the table as it settled, and I want you to look at the shape of it, not just the top and bottom:
- 1st year: $225,000
- 2nd year: $235,000
- 3rd year: $260,000
- 4th year: $310,000
- 5th year: $365,000
- 6th year: $390,000
- 7th year: $420,000
- 8th year: $435,000
Notice the jumps. The gap between second and third year is modest. The gap between third and fourth is fifty grand. The step from third to fourth to fifth is where the ladder stops being a raise and starts being a bet the firm is making on you. That is the moment your economics change, when your billing rate crosses into serious money and the partnership starts quietly deciding whether you are a keeper or an expense.
Why does Milbank keep going first? Because going first is cheap and matching is expensive. If you announce the raise, you own the recruiting narrative for a news cycle, the associate boards light up with your name, and every other firm has to spend the same dollars while looking like followers. It costs Milbank nothing extra to lead. It costs Cravath its dignity to match. That asymmetry is the whole game, and I have watched managing partners understand it too slowly for two decades.
What the $225k scale tells me is not that associates are worth $225,000. It tells me that the top forty or fifty firms are locked in a coordination equilibrium so tight that none of them can afford to break ranks downward, and none of them can gain much by breaking ranks upward except for the bragging. The number is a handshake. And the handshake has held at $225,000 into late 2025, which is its own quiet signal. Two years without a top-of-scale bump, in a market this rich, means the firms found the ceiling where clients start screaming.
the bonus is where the truth lives
Base salary is public theater. The bonus is where you find the actual firm.
The year-end bonus scale that hardened after 2019 looked, on the Cravath match, something like $15,000 for the newest class prorated, climbing to $115,000 for the most senior associates. Clean, lockstep, published, and largely meaningless as a measure of who was actually generating value inside the building.
Because the published bonus is the floor, not the story.
Watch Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz if you want to see what a firm does when it refuses to play the scale game at all. Wachtell does not chase the published bonus number. It pays associates bonuses that can run to the size of the base salary itself, sometimes north of it, because a lean firm with monstrous profitability per lawyer can afford to hand a mid-level associate a check that would make a Cravath fifth-year quietly update his resume. Wachtell is not competing on salary. It is competing on the number nobody publishes.
Then there is the special bonus, that beautiful pandemic-era invention. In 2021 the deal machine ran so hot that firms started paying special bonuses on top of year-end bonuses, ranging from around $12,000 for the juniors up to $64,000 for the seniors. Milbank rolled out spring bonuses. Davis Polk answered. The whole thing became a second, parallel bonus season that existed for exactly one reason: the work was drowning people, and the firms needed a way to keep the bodies at their desks through the exhaustion without touching the sacred base scale.
That is the tell. When a firm wants to pay you more without committing to paying you more forever, it invents a bonus category. Special bonus, retention bonus, spring bonus, appreciation bonus. The vocabulary changes. The intention never does. It is money with an expiration date, designed to buy the next twelve months of your loyalty and nothing beyond it.
I tell my candidates the same thing every time. Do not read the base scale. Everyone has the base scale. Read the bonus, and then read whether the bonus is lockstep or discretionary, because a discretionary bonus at a black-box firm means your compensation is a relationship, not a right. And relationships, as anyone who has been through a lateral move knows, can cool.
the gap that stopped being a gap and became a canyon
Now the part that keeps me employed.
When a first-year at a top firm makes $225,000 before bonus, and a first-year at a strong regional firm in the same city makes $110,000, and a new public defender or a small-firm associate makes $70,000, you no longer have a market with tiers. You have two different economies that happen to share a bar license.
This gap used to be a matter of degree. A BigLaw associate made more than a mid-market associate, sure, but they were recognizably in the same profession, doing recognizably similar work, and a lateral could move between the worlds if the timing was right. That mobility is dying. When the pay differential doubles or triples, the two groups stop competing for the same people, stop training people the same way, and stop being interchangeable in the eyes of clients.
The math is simple and brutal. A first-year associate at $225,000, fully loaded with benefits and overhead, has to be billed out at a rate above a thousand dollars an hour to make the firm money. So the firm bills them above a thousand dollars an hour. And clients, being clients, pay it for the brand and complain about it in the same breath. Partner rates at the top firms crossed $2,000 an hour some time ago and kept climbing. Kirkland & Ellis, the revenue leader, has partners whose rates would give a corporate GC a small stroke if the GC had not stopped reading the invoices years ago.
What this does to the profession is create a permanent sorting event at the very start of a career. The associate who lands the top firm out of law school is on the $225k escalator. The equally talented associate who took the regional offer, or the government job, or the boutique, is on a different escalator entirely, and the two escalators do not connect at any floor. I place partners, and I can tell you that by the time someone is senior enough for me to move, the early sorting has usually already decided which conversations I can even have about them.
The gap is not just between firms. It is inside firms too, and that is where the two-tier partnership comes in.
the non-equity tier is eating the middle
Here is the structural change that matters more than any salary raise, and it gets a fraction of the attention.
Twenty years ago, partner meant partner. You were an owner. You put capital in, you took profit out, you voted, you shared the risk and the reward. The single-tier equity partnership was the norm at the elite firms, and Milbank, to its credit, has held onto full equity partnership longer than most, which is part of why its associates trust its raises. When an all-equity firm pays you, the money is coming out of the owners’ own pockets, and that concentrates the mind.
But across the Am Law 200, the two-tier partnership has spread like ivy. The large majority of big firms now run a non-equity, or income, partner tier: lawyers who carry the title, appear on the letterhead, bill at partner rates, and do not own the firm. They get a salary, maybe a bonus, a business card that says partner, and a client-facing credibility that says the same. They do not get the profit split. They do not, in most cases, get a real vote.
Kirkland is the archetype and the machine that proved the model at scale. A vast non-equity partner class, promoted early, given the title to keep them and to sell them to clients, filtered over years toward a much smaller equity share where the black-box compensation and the eight-figure outcomes live. The spread between the bottom of the equity partnership and the top at Kirkland is enormous, and that spread is the point. It lets the firm pay a rainmaker whatever it takes while paying the service partners what the market bears.
Cravath watched this and blinked. In 2021 the old fortress of pure lockstep partner compensation admitted, quietly, that it could no longer keep its stars if it insisted every partner of the same seniority earn the same amount. Cravath began moving off strict lockstep, made lateral partner hires it had historically refused to make, and generally accepted that the Kirkland model had bent the market around it. When Cravath changes, the profession has already changed. Cravath is the last one to move, always, which is exactly why its moves are the most reliable diagnostic.
What does the spreading non-equity tier tell me? It tells me the partnership has become a marketing category as much as an ownership category. The title is now a retention tool for people the firm wants to keep visible but does not want to make owners. That is not a scandal. It is just honest to admit. But it changes what a candidate should ask, and I coach every senior associate and every income partner I represent to ask it plainly: am I being offered ownership, or am I being offered a title that looks like ownership? The compensation table answers that question if you know where to look. Draw the origination credit rules. Look at whether the offer includes a capital contribution. A firm that wants your capital wants you. A firm that just wants your name on the door wants your billings.
The cruelty of the two-tier system is that it can suspend people indefinitely. The non-equity partner who never quite makes equity, year after year, is in a comfortable and gilded holding pattern, earning very good money, carrying a very good title, and slowly aging out of the mobility that would let them go somewhere they could own something. I have moved a lot of those people. The conversation always starts the same way. “I thought I was going to make equity two years ago.”
golden handcuffs, and the year everyone tested them
Money is supposed to buy loyalty. Mostly it buys presence.
At $225,000 out of the gate, climbing to $435,000 by the eighth year, plus bonuses, the associate is wearing what everyone calls the golden handcuffs, and the cliche is a cliche because it is true. You cannot replicate that income anywhere except at another firm on the same scale. The government job pays a third. The in-house job at a good company pays well but not that well early, and the equity that is supposed to make up the difference is a lottery ticket. So the associate stays, and bills, and stays, and the firm counts on the fact that the money makes leaving irrational.
Except the handcuffs only hold if the associate believes the money is the whole deal. And in 2025 a lot of them stopped believing that.
When the current administration began issuing executive orders targeting specific law firms in the spring of 2025, stripping security clearances and threatening federal contracts and access, the profession split in a way I have never seen in twenty years of doing this. Some firms cut deals. Paul, Weiss reached an arrangement with the White House. Skadden, Milbank, Willkie, Kirkland, Latham and others followed with pro bono commitments, hundreds of millions of dollars in pledged work, the whole apparatus of accommodation. Milbank, the firm that keeps grabbing the compensation pen, was among the firms that made a deal.
Other firms fought, and won. The courts were not close about it. In Perkins Coie LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice (D.D.C. 2025), Judge Beryl Howell struck the executive order down as unconstitutional. In Jenner & Block LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice (D.D.C. 2025), Judge John Bates did the same. So did Judge Richard Leon in the WilmerHale matter, Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP v. Executive Office of the President (D.D.C. 2025), and Judge Loren AliKhan in Susman Godfrey LLP v. Executive Office of the President (D.D.C. 2025). Four firms fought, four firms won on the constitutional merits, and the firms that had settled were left explaining to their own associates why they had folded when litigation would have prevailed.
And the associates noticed. Some of them left. Rachel Cohen at Skadden made her resignation public and loud. Associates at several of the settling firms walked, or organized, or went to the press. For the first time in my career I watched people leave BigLaw over something that was not money, at firms that were paying them the top of the scale, and I watched the handcuffs turn out to be made of something softer than everyone assumed.
That is the retention lesson of 2025, and it should terrify every executive committee that thinks the $225k scale buys silence. The money holds people who are staying for money. It does not hold people who came to believe the institution stood for something and then watched it stand for nothing. When the psychological contract breaks, the salary becomes a reason to be embarrassed rather than a reason to stay, and the best associates, the ones with options, are precisely the ones who can afford to act on principle.
The mobility picture, meanwhile, has never been more lopsided. Partner lateral movement at the top has become a bloodsport, driven by the same black-box economics that Kirkland pioneered and Paul, Weiss adopted with a vengeance when it built out and raided competitors, prompting counter-raids that had recruiters like me working weekends through 2024 and into 2025. A partner with a real, portable book of business can name a number, and the number keeps going up, because the two-tier, spread-heavy compensation model exists specifically to pay that person whatever it takes. A partner without portable business, an income partner whose value is tied to a firm’s platform rather than to their own clients, has almost no mobility at all. The market for them is thin and getting thinner.
So the same system that made the rainmaker infinitely mobile made the service partner nearly stuck. That is not an accident. That is the design working as intended.
what the tea leaves actually say
I have spent this whole piece reading compensation tables, so let me tell you the reading, plainly, without the upbeat wrap-up that these things usually end with.
The $225k scale is not generosity. It is a coordination device among a few dozen firms that have priced themselves into a separate economy, and the plateau at $225,000 since November 2023 tells me they have found the edge of what clients will tolerate before the rate pushback turns into a client revolt. The next move on base salary, whenever it comes, will be smaller than the associate boards hope and later than they expect, because the firms are now managing a ceiling, not chasing a floor.
The bonus is where you learn the truth about a firm, and the proliferation of special bonuses, spring bonuses and discretionary carve-outs tells me the firms want maximum flexibility to pay for one more year of loyalty without committing to anything permanent. Read the bonus structure before you read the salary. Always.
The non-equity partner tier is eating the middle of the profession, converting ownership into a title and suspending capable people in a gilded holding pattern that slowly costs them their mobility. If someone offers you a partnership, make them tell you which kind, and make them put the capital question and the origination rules in writing.
And the golden handcuffs, the whole premise that enough money buys enough loyalty, cracked in public in 2025, at the richest firms, over something the money could not fix. The firms that fought the executive orders and won, in Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey, bought themselves something the settling firms cannot buy back at any scale: associates who believe the place they work for will not fold. That belief is worth more than a raise, and it does not show up on any compensation table I have ever read.
My honest opinion, after twenty years and more napkin math than I care to admit: the profession has built a machine that pays its juniors like investment bankers, titles its middles like owners without making them owners, and pays its rainmakers like founders, and the whole structure runs on the assumption that money is the only thing anyone is optimizing for. That assumption held for a very long time. It stopped holding in 2025. The firms that understand why will win the next decade of talent. The firms that think another special bonus will paper over it are the firms whose partners will be calling me on a Sunday, not saying hello, telling me who went first.