Everyone Hates Associate Pay Bumps—Except Associates: The Morning Minute

EARLY EDUCATION - Law school applications are still sky high, but the legal industry seems to be growing less content with simply sitting back and waiting for future generations to find it. As we explore in the latest Law.com Trendspotter column, intense competition for talent, combined with a sharper focus on diverse hiring, has law firm and law school leaders increasingly talking about the need to take a more proactive approach to recruiting by engaging young people as early as high school and, in some cases, even grade school. The idea is to build future generations of attorneys who come from more diverse backgrounds and are better equipped for—and more interested in—a career in the law. The industry, in turn, could benefit from a wave of new lawyers who joined the profession because they wanted to and were prepared to, rather than because it was a family tradition or because law school was the “safe” choice for an otherwise aimless college grad. I’m interested to hear from you: What will it take for pre-law school pipeline programs to be effective? Let me know at [email protected].

CHECKS, PLEASE - It’s become a time-honored ritual as predictable as the changing of seasons: Big Law jacks up associate salaries and everyone pretends to be appalled for a couple of weeks. But one group that is decidedly not all that offended by associates making more money is, well, associates. As Law.com’s Dan Roe reports, while industry veterans took to LinkedIn and Twitter to grouse about the negative implications of the raises, many users on Reddit, Twitter and Fishbowl claiming to be Big Law associates eagerly traded notes on the firms that matched Milbank’s $10,000 raise and exchanged predictions on the next firms to match or cover. To be sure, it’s still plenty true that money can’t paper over the mental and physical toll the last nearly two years of insane demand have taken on young lawyers. But the overall sentiment on social media seems to be that, while pay raises don’t necessarily help in that regard, they don’t exactly hurt either. As Reddit user LackEither4623 so poetically summed it up (in a post that garned 510 upvotes): “Going from making 190k to 215k without doing sh*t was the greatest stunt I have ever pulled.”

COMBINATION LOCK - The Federal Trade Commission sued Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings Tuesday in District of Columbia District Court to block the companies from consummating their $4.4. billion merger. The complaint, which is filed under seal, is assigned to U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss, who issued a temporary restraining order Tuesday pending a hearing on the government’s motion. Aerojet is represented by Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer. Lockheed is advised by Hogan Lovells and McDermott Will & Emery. The case is 1:22-cv-00174, Federal Trade Commission v. Lockheed Martin et al. Stay up on the latest deals and litigation with the new Law.com Radar.  

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