ANALYSIS: Legal ‘Big Dogs’ Say First-Years Are Overpaid

Most attorneys believe their firm is missing the mark in how it compensates first-year associates—but they’re split on whether that compensation is too high or too low, a recent Bloomberg Law survey showed. As a follow-up to my analysis of these results last month, I wanted to learn more about these respondents—where they work, what their roles are—in hopes that it would shed some additional light on this unanticipated split.

I suspected that most attorneys who said that they feel first-years are overpaid wouldn’t be associate attorneys, and they wouldn’t be working in small law firms, either—and the survey data ...