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Some big law firms have increased salaries of first-year associates to $180,000 in an effort to lure the best recruits, but now some of those firms are raising the bar by offering benefit packages that include flexible schedules, child care and elderly care assistance, student loan assistance programs, paid parental leave, unlimited paid vacation, private banking, subsidized gym membership and career and family coaching services, reports Bloomberg Law.

Reporter Carmen Castro-Pagan quotes Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s chief talent officer as saying :the war for talent is intensifying,” as she explains that declining law school enrollment and low LSAT scores result in fewer of the most talented students are entering the profession.

Orrick now offers primary caregivers 22 weeks of paid parental leave and up to nine months of job protection.

White & Case LLP has an adoption assistance program that allows employees to set aside pretax dollars of up to $13,460 to help offset adoption expenses, and Goodwin has a program to help lawyers and professional staff refinance and consolidate their student loans. Other benefits can include on-site fitness centers, career counseling, flexible vacations, and travel and living expenses, the Bloomberg article reports.

Read the article.

Corporate clients have been unenthusiastic on the topic of the $180,000 first-year lawyer, as well as the idea of big-name lawyers charging their clients $2,000 per hour, reports Above the Law. But this environment could present opportunity for competition from non-mega firms.

The site tells how the global general counsel for Bank of America let the nation’s largest law firms know that he doesn’t intend to absorb the cost of the salary increase. “While we respect the firms’ judgment about what best serves their long-term competitive interests,” he wrote in an email that has become public, “we are aware of no market-driven basis for such an increase and do not expect to bear the costs of the firms’ decisions.”

But there’s an opportunity here for firms that don’t appear on the top 100 lists, writes David Perla. “With the many tools available today, smaller providers of legal services have the capacity to present (in both appearance and reality) truly viable alternatives to their elite competition. This is true both for individual lawyers and for law firms as a whole,” he writes.

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Bank of America’s top lawyer isn’t the only in-house attorney expressing displeasure with associate salary raises announced recently by BigLaw firms and boutiques, reports Sara Randazzo of The Wall Street Journal. She says other general counsel are sending letters to their outside law firms, warning them of the potential for relationship problems if they join in the pay hikes.

The report quotes a letter Allstate Corp.’s general counsel, Susan Lees, sent to some law firms, challenging the logic of paying first-year associates $180,000.

“[O]ne must question the merits of a business model that compensates fresh law school graduates, who are devoid of any meaningful lawyering experience, with a salary greater than that of a seasoned in-house corporate attorney with a decade or more of experience counseling senior leaders in our organization,” states Ms. Lees’s letter, which was reviewed by Law Blog.

Read the article.

In a new Bloomberg article, Stephen Poor, chair emeritus of Seyfarth Shaw, offers some perspective on what lies ahead for law firms in light of the recent escalation of pay for associates. He concludes that firms “still using a more traditional structure will experience this compensation increase as the first domino in a cascade throughout all fee earners, putting immense pressure on future performance and the health and stability of the firm.”

Traditionally, he writes, firms passed the burden of salary hikes to their clients via higher rates, reducing expenses elsewhere in the organization, raising (often silently) expectations on associates or being quicker to cut expenses (and people) in the face of declining demand.

“This time is different,” he writes. “Not because Big Law has moved into some form of corporate socialism, but because circumstances have changed. As power has shifted to buyers of legal services and the options for legal service delivery have expanded, the idea that firms will be able to shift some or all of the cost of associate compensation to rate increases seems almost inconceivable. Over a period of years? Perhaps. From the start? Not likely.”

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Kristen Jarvis Johnson, 33, says she “encountered blatant gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and a very clear glass ceiling” as she climbed the ladder as a $400,000 a year senior associate at Squire Patton Boggs, in its Qatar office.

As a story in The Washington Post put it, “she had enough of being one of the few women in the upper ranks of her white-shoe law firm. She’d had enough of hitting or exceeding all her targets and being told she didn’t need a bonus. She’d had enough of being told she had to work harder after advising on a case in between contractions as she was in labor.”

So she left the firm.

A Squire Patton spokesman said that 13 of the 29 lawyers promoted to partner globally this year were women, and during the period when Johnson was in Doha, the firm had four partners in the office, two of whom were women.

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The national law firm of Quarles & Brady LLP has announced that BTI Consulting Group has named it one of the best firms delivering alternative fee arrangements (AFAs). Out of the 650 firms surveyed, 22 firms received this honor.

According to BTI Consulting Group, “top legal decision makers credit their new love of AFAs to improved client focus, predictability in budgets, a more streamlined approach to the work, and the savings—which remain well in the double digits. Clients using AFAs report savings of 13.9% in 2015 compared to 14.4% in 2013. These savings effectively add $2.7 million to the average client’s legal budget.” On April 28, the results were published in Law360.

“The firm strives to provide the absolute best legal counsel at a price that is right for our clients,” said firm chair Kimberly Leach Johnson. “We are proud to be listed as one of the top firms at developing and delivering AFAs.”

To view BTI Consulting Group’s report, click here.

An article on the website of ContractRoom considers some of the advanced legal technology options that exist to assist in most of the daily functions of practicing law today.

These functions include legal research, document review and evidence compilation, synthesizing research and developing a case, writing legal advice, drafting documents off templates, drafting documents with multiple parties, getting sign-offs and approvals from multiple parties, staying on top of contractual requirements, and collating evidence requested in litigation.

Options are offered for the various functions.

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Morae Legal has posted a discussion about disruption in legal service delivery, involving Morae Legal Chief Strategy Officer Joy Saphla and Pearson plc Senior Vice President & General Counsel Bjarne Tellmann.

In this conversation, Tellmann asserts that the paradox of the massive increase in necessary legal work due to new legislation and regulation — coupled with fewer jobs for attorneys — is foundation for disruption in the practice.

The discussion focuses on how this disruption has altered legal service delivery, including changes in the models general counsel can use to staff matters and build legal teams in new and creative ways.

The conversation covers:

• How in-house teams are changing and growing with highly specialized experts.
• Optimal allocation between in-house and outsourced work.
• Specific examples Pearson has employed to reduce costs and become more efficient within their legal department.

Download the conversation.

The cornerstone of a productive client and outside counsel relationship starts by setting clear and consistent expectations for the legal department at the outset of the client engagement, says Kelly Spratt-Szarzynski, senior strategic consultant on the LexisNexis® CounselLink team.

This involves developing an outside counsel guidelines document that formally communicates the legal department expectations.  These guidelines apply to all external legal vendors and helps hold all parties accountable to the same set of standards related to billing, matter management and corporate policies.

According to Spratt-Szarzynski, outside counsel guidelines generally contain information broken into the following three categories: Processes and procedures, requirements, and policies.

Read the article.