Legal Week noted recently that UK and US legal markets were converging. And with London firms handing out substantial rises for assistants this
year, that process has taken a considerable step forward as the gap between New York and City ‘rates’ narrows again.
Except, of course, quite a few US law firms are not actually paying US rates anymore. As exclusively revealed last week by legalweek.com, Weil Gotshal & Manges has become the latest US firm to pay its UK lawyers more than those on its home turf, shifting in one step from ‘mid-Atlantic’ to ‘Wall Street-plus’. Other examples include Latham & Watkins and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, which both use off-market conversion rates to mark up their salaries. But is such generosity a sign of strength or weakness? In the case of Latham, which despite trail-blazing global progress is still a good way off reaching the top tier of US profitability, paying such salaries hardly seems a stunning endorsement of its drawing power for City recruits.
