Associate Salaries and Legal Landscape: In-House vs. Law Firms

Description

• Associates at large law firms often face pressure to bill hours, leading them to take on tasks quickly.
• Law firms leverage relationships to encourage work delegation.
• In-house teams should be cautious when hiring associates to maintain work quality.
• A potential cause of decreasing quality is the rush to acquire staff amid market demand.
• Reduced face-to-face interactions may impact work quality at certain firms.

Transcript

Transcript:

So the problem with associates, especially at a lot of large law firms, is that they're under a lot of pressure to bill hours. So once you give them something, they often run with it because they want to bill hours. The law firms will use the relationships to encourage you to have them do work.

Be very careful as well. Often, in-house people run into that when they hire associates. Talking about the quality decreasing, I wonder why that would happen. I sense that a lot of it is about many law firms needing to acquire people to go into the office. There were fewer face-to-face interactions and things I needed to be aware of about the quality decreasing, which may just be at certain firms.

But I think law firms need people whenever the market gets overheated, and many people are coming. I think the quality of the work can decrease to a great extent.