Completely ruining the game.
Quinn Emanuel has increased the salaries of its newly qualified solicitors to £180,000, putting thirty thousand pounds’ worth of clear blue water between itself and the top-paying UK firms.
Quinn used to pay its NQs £152k, but a week after Freshfields proudly upped its pay for new solicitors to £150k, the US litigation specialist followed Gibson Dunn and leapt to an even more nonsensical sum.
From 1 June, as well as NQs taking home almost £9k a month, Quinn will have 1PQE’s on £195k, up from £160K, and 2PQEs on £220k, up from £184k. Seems reasonable. Here are all the increases:
Alex Gerbi, Quinn Emanuel’s London co-managing partner, said the firm was rewarding “our outstanding lawyers for the contribution they make daily to the success of our practice in London”, and was also seeking to “attract the very best new talent”.
Even before the latest raises, junior Quinn lawyers described their remuneration as “very generous”. They told ROF the work was “intense”, but “as long as you are working with nice teams, you can fit your life around your work most of the time”.
Their chief grumble was the requirement to come into the office three days a week which “eats into the life part for no good reason, and looks grotesque against the background of all the noise the firm has made in the legal press about the work from anywhere policy”. Maybe another £30k a year will soothe those quibbles.
Rancour over the NQ pay war was the biggest issue alongside WFH in RollOnFriday’s Best Law Firms to Work At 2024. Thousands of lawyers wrote in, and a significant proportion expressed their dismay at the knock-on effects of paying such junior solicitors such gigantic sums.
Pay bunching, where lawyers further up the totem pole are not paid much more the NQs and see their salaries increase by only minimal amounts between bands, was the key concern. Freshfields and now Quinn’s moves have reignited those complaints.
At firms where, behind the publicised NQ salary, senior bands are bunched together, some lawyers are beginning to ask why they, or the NQs themselves in a couple of years, should bother sticking around.
“I find this NQ pay just madness”, a senior lawyer at Norton Rose Fulbright told RollOnFriday.
“Nevermind ‘overpaying’ for juniors, the question is what is the position for the rest of the non-partner professionals”, they said.
As an example, they gave the position of 8PQE solicitors at NRF who are paid circa £162,000 compared to NQs on £125,000. “It begs the question, why are senior professionals staying/taking on the level of responsibility they do (running billion pound deals), when they earn c.22%/29% (depending how you measure it) more than NQs, and what is the carrot for NQs, knowing that if they stay, they are looking at effective 3.3% increases per year?”
An 8PQ at Freshfields commented on ROF that the pay “is good enough, but there is definitely bunching (and opaqueness as you get higher), which makes many nod their heads when you see comments about NQ pay being too high”.
“£180k for a baby solicitor is outrageous”, said one commenter. “What are the NQs doing for that kind of wedge?” asked another.
“Being available at close to all hours of the day and most days of the year, in order to do work which is extremely dull whilst simultaneously requiring strong attention to detail, and having the communication nous to explain complicated concepts to demanding clients and keep them happy”, responded one well-paid NQ.
“It’s not brain surgery, and it doesn’t require one to be a genius (or even particularly smart at all – I certainly am not). But it does require quite substantial reserves of resilience, stamina, and interpersonal skills”, they said.
“This isn’t a sustainable business model”, suggested one lawyer. “Inexperienced NQs simply are not worth this level of pay. There’s plenty of partners throughout the UK who aren’t worth this level of pay!”
“I honestly don’t understand the insane trajectory of NQ salaries over the past couple of years”, said a Magic Circle solicitor. “As a 7PQE at a MC firm in 2021 my base was £133k – how far things have come. What is the rationale here? MC firms bleat on about ‘attracting the best talent’ but there is a massive oversubscription of wannabe lawyers from Russell group unis who, in my experience, are largely fungible.”
Others defended the stratospheric rises. “Firms are paying for a combination of real dedication and stamina, being very bright and having the potential to be the very best at doing something that often manages to be both incredibly stressful and insufferably dull”, said a commenter sympathetic to the gold-plated NQs.
“There aren’t that many people capable of doing it and willing to do it. And of those that are – the highest paying firms want the very best of them”.
Making themselves worthy of such a large investment meant it was a Faustian pact, said others. “The expectations of you based on this level of pay must be utterly ludicrous. Is it really a worthwhile trade-off to sacrifice your personal time and mental wellbeing for the demands of a role paying that salary?” Just wait until Kirkland punches through the £200k barrier in the autumn.
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