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Comment by brianbreslin | Hacker News Reader

Are these law firms structured similar to wall street where a big portion of a partner's pay is in form of bonuses?

In general, at the associate level, no. Partner level positions have varying compensation agreements, so hard to generalize there, but associates generally receive most of their compensation in salary.

This is as opposed to finance, where even associate level positions will generally pay a large portion of total compensation in the form of an annual bonus, tied to the firm's performance. In a good year, these can exceed 100% of base salary after a few years of experience, but this is not the case for any non-partner lawyers I know of.

Susman, Wachtell, Boies (and several other litigation boutiques) all have had bonuses that exceeded 100% of base salary (160k). In order to get those bonuses, however, you're probably looking at at least 2400 billable hours a year.

Working 2400 billable hours probably means closer to 3000 actual hours right?

Right. 80% efficiency is about as high as you can get. It's a real grind.

A lawyer dies and goes to heaven. He complains: "I'm too young to die; I'm only 45!"

The response: 'Not according to your billable hours.'

Like in the largest financial firms like GS, there is a compensation committee that determines your yearly profit share.

Pretty interesting reading:

http://www.skadden.com/sites/default/files/ckeditor/files/Ho...

From my understanding, only if you're a partner.

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