Bloomberg Law: Associate Salaries Plateau as Big Law Faces Listless M&A Market

By: Meghan Tribe | July 7, 2025, 7:00 AM PDT; Updated: July 8, 2025, 7:41 AM PDT

• Big Law associate raises unlikely in face of unpredictable markets

• Current scale tops out at $225,000 for the most competitive firms

Big Law associates should get used to the current pay scales at their firms.

“I don’t think that this is probably the year that there will be any sort of raises when it comes to base pay,” said Ru Bhatt, a New York-based recruiter for Major Lindsey & Africa.

The tepid bounce back of mergers and acquisitions work, a key performance driver, has many firms resetting their expectations for this year. They’re looking to keep down costs and juice profits as the recruiting focus remains on high-end partners at leading firms.

Associate salaries range from $225,000 to $435,000 on the seniority-based “Cravath scale” used by several prominent firms. The starting figure has ratcheted up three times in the last five years and was last set in November 2023 by Manhattan-founded Milbank LLP.

Many of the country’s 50 largest firms will continue to match salary increases—if Milbank or another rival decide to make a move—even in a down market. Others will look at factors like billing rates, profitability, and the specific needs of the firms, said Summer Eberhard, a California-based legal recruiter at Lateral Link.

“While Big Law firms want to be competitive on compensation, some face genuine constraints due to their rate structures, client mix, and financial position,” Eberhard said. “For some, matching may not be viable, regardless of their intention to remain competitive for top talent.”

Just more than half of the 59 large law firms—those with more than $100 million in annual gross revenue—that responded to Bloomberg Law’s Leading Law Firms survey said salaries start at $225,000 for at least some of their associates. Many that hit the Cravath scale reserve the higher starting salaries for associates in a few major markets, like New York and San Francisco.

Another nine firms said their salaries start slightly below that mark, at between $210,000 and $215,000. The remaining 19 firms reported starting associate salaries ranging from $120,000 to $195,000.  

Who's on the Cravath Scale?

The firms that pay at or near the Cravath scale are mostly bigger and more profitable than the others. All except two of the firms with at least $1 billion in annual revenue—BakerHostetler ($211,000) and McGuireWoods ($215,000)—reported starting salaries at the top rate. All of the firms with at least $2.5 million in profits per equity partner also started at the Cravath rate.

Munger Tolles, Vedder Price, and Porter Hedges were the only participating firms that paid at the top level and reported less than $400 million in gross revenue. Vedder Price and Porter Hedges also were the only Cravath-scale firms to report less than $1.5 million in profits per equity partner.

Big Law ‘Engine’ Stalls

M&A work is “the engine of the Big Law firms,” said Michelle Fivel, partner and co-founder at search firm Hatch Henderson Fivel. It’s also a bellwether for associate hiring across firms, even in seemingly unrelated practices like litigation.

Deals activity ticked up by nearly 19% in the first half of the year compared to the same time last year, but not nearly at the rate expected when President Donald Trump won a return trip to the White House. Trump’s tariff wars and global unrest tamped down earlier expectations for an M&A boom.

“New deal flow is not what had been hoped for with a Republican administration coming into the White House and doing the things that traditionally are seen as business friendly,” Fivel said. “That is kind of a disappointment, and frankly, a surprise,” she said.

A rush of deals work in 2021 fueled Big Law’s salary wars, which saw top law firms hike salaries and dole out several rounds of bonuses to keep associates on the payroll and boost headcount through lateral hires.

That kind of demand is long gone four years later.

Associate hiring fell 5.9% year-over-year over the first quarter of 2025, according to a report by Firm Prospects. Hiring was down 39% from its peak in 2024, the report said. Hires ticked slightly upward in Q2, but still didn’t match 2024 numbers.

“They’re being very deliberate in their hiring process, who they’re considering what the process looks like, and what they’re offering to those associates at the end of the process,” Fivel said.

Firms participating in the survey split their top growth targets evenly between litigation and corporate and M&A practice groups. Eberhard said she’s seeing a spike in demand for litigators while corporate associate recruiting as been mostly flat.

Bonus Season

Larger annual bonuses could still be on the table for associates at top firms, Bhatt said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if a firm comes out and decides to share a little bit more of that wealth,” he said. “But at the same time, there’s a lot of uncertainty and people are being really cautious in the market.”

Milbank, which has emerged as a compensation leader, made a splash last year by doling out summer bonuses of up to $25,000 apiece. Several firms later matched the move while rolling out year-end bonuses, with total extra payments reaching as high as $140,000.

Firms often prefer one-time bonus payments over committing to raising salary scales, but the money comes out of partner profits either way.

“It is up to these partners to decide: Am I willing to forgo some of my comp to keep associates happy or to attract the right types of associates?” Bhatt said.

(Updated with additional information on firms that reported paying top starting rate. A previous version of this story was corrected to remove an inaccurate reference to profits per equity partner at Best Best & Krieger.)

Read the original article here.