City pay war: Linklaters matches Freshfields with £150k NQ lawyer salary

To be fair, TS very likely to get bought out by a US mega firm that hasn’t entered the London market yet (like PW until recently) so there is a decent chance that they may shoot up the pay scales post that takeover, once the US overlords get rid of the dead wood cult die hard. Either that or the firm collapses in the next 12 months which I’d say is the bigger prospect as of today.

Rumours are that another 3 are going to leave in the next two weeks.

PW literally pays marginally more at NQ level. I envy your swanky digs though.

Are the rumours true that Sachdev has a professional blow dry each morning before he arrives in the office? True commitment that.

Freshfields / Stinklaters – £205-225k
CC – £170-180k
ASOS – £165-170k
Slaughtered and Dismayed – £150-160k

+up to 70% bonus for certain practice areas (10-15% for S&M)

In summary, it’s a has been firm which traditionally offered good quality private equity work with big private equity houses whilst enjoying a decent culture. In reality, whilst the former was true, the latter was only true if you were trained at the firm and were a member of the club so to speak. So many laterals came and left as they felt excluded from the culture and felt like they couldn’t fit in. The basis of this largely revolves around the notion that people at the firm solely had personal relationships and friendships with others at the firm, so if you imagine your non work friendships, it takes a while for new friends to join. Except a work place shouldn’t have a culture purely based on there being no difference between personal and professional like TS has.

So fundamentally the firm couldn’t retain any of its lateral hires. Now fast forward a few years to the times where the US firms came into play in London with their own PE client relationships. Many of these big clients of US firms traditionally had their UK and EU work covered by TS and Macs etc. but as the US giants settled in London, the PE clients moved their business to the US firms as it makes sense for continuity and because US firms, as we know, will pull out every stop to get deals signed in weekends.

So as this happens, partners at TS realise that to compete they need to bring in more associates. Unfortunately, given the above point about why laterals didn’t stay, many potential candidates turned them down or were not good enough. So in terms of competing TS couldn’t do that from a logistical / lawyer power point of view. So ultimately, given the loss of the TS PE practice, and the accompanying reduction in PEP many TS partners are using their pre existing relationships with UK and EU PE people athe big firms to jump shop to US firms for the work and the vast increase in pay.

So now the PE practice has gone, PEP is falling even more. But that’s not the end of the story, TS has always had a strong corporate practice and this was needed to increase to make up for the short fall im PE work. What’s the thing with huge corporate clients though? They’re multinational and this has only increased with globalisation. They are only interested im advisors who can advise them across the world. TS only has a London office and one partner in Paris so when you compare it to the MC or global firms like HL or BM it can’t compete. So now all the corporate partners are leaving as they can go elsewhere for more money.

I don’t think you understand how any of this works…