Which London Law Firms Pay NQs The Most?
Up the London legal pay rates go again – no sooner had we reported on Quinn Emanuel’s pay rate rise when Linklater announced that they have boosted newly qualified (NQ) pay rates for junior lawyers to £150,000.
The move aligns Linklaters with its Magic Circle counterpart, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, which announced a similar pay increase earlier this month.
But the US law pay rates continue to dominate in the London legal scene and Linklaters still lags behind the market-leading salaries offered by major U.S. firms like Gibson Dunn and Quinn Emanuel, which have set their junior lawyer compensation at a staggering £180,000.
Linklaters and Freshfields offer the highest salaries among UK firms, but they still trail behind the compensation packages provided by their U.S. counterparts, which benefit from the lucrative U.S. market.
In addition to the increase for newly-qualified lawyers, Linklaters has also raised trainee salaries. First-year trainees will now earn £56,000, up from £50,000, while second-year trainees will receive £61,000, an increase from £55,000. Solicitor apprentices’ salaries have also been bumped up from £25,000 to £28,000. These changes took effect on May 1.
An elite group of U.S. firms, including Akin, Fried Frank, and Milbank, pay their London-based newly-qualified lawyers £177,500, while six others – Vinson & Elkins, Kirkland & Ellis, Latham & Watkins, Paul Hastings, Davis Polk, and Weil – offer salaries ranging from £170,000 to just under £174,000, reflecting the ongoing junior salary war on both sides of the Atlantic.
