Clyde & Co is the latest firm to boost its salaries for newly qualified (NQ) lawyers, raising the base rate to £70,000.

The move represents an 8% pay increase for the firm's most junior associates, who had previously been paid £65,000.

The firm has also bumped up pay for its trainees. First-year trainees will now take home £40,000, up from £38,000, while second-year trainee pay has increased to £42,000, up from £40,000.

Some 86% of its most recent trainee cohort have taken up contracts with the firm. Out of the 43 trainees due to qualify this autumn, 37 are staying on.

The new recruits will boost the London office's headcount by 33, with three trainees joining the firm's Manchester firm and one other in its Guildford outpost.

Clydes joins the ranks of firms to have bumped NQ pay in recent months, after a pay war erupted among the top U.K. firms earlier this year following Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer's announcement that it was increasing NQ pay to £100,000.

Several other firms, including Herbert Smith Freehills, Hogan Lovells and Pinsent Masons, then boosted their own NQ salaries, with the rest of the Magic Circle roughly matching Freshfields' rate, dependent on bonuses.

U.S. firm Weil Gotshal & Manges boosted its trainee pay yesterday (21 August), raising first-years' salaries to £50,000 and second-years' to £55,000, putting the firm's trainee pay on a par with the likes of Sidley Austin and Milbank.