A question for the small-shop attorneys, specifically the personal injury/med-mal practitioners. How does your firm handle compensation and bonuses/incentive payments?

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I’ll admit I’m not “feeling the love” with our scheme. We are a firm of 6 attorneys, mostly a med-mal and catastrophic injury boutique. We don’t have any metrics or quotas, just the principal partner making an assessment of your performance at year end and deciding your bonus. He has said the assessment includes general work quality and not necessarily case generation or origination - most of our work is either referred from outside or cold-calls anyway.

We get a somewhat low salary, compared to our peers, and so I’ve been holding out for the prospect of significant bonuses once I start getting results, which has been implied by the partner. I am finally seeing cases that I’ve initiated, or inherited from other attorneys at very early stages, get results, including my first seven-figure settlement last year. Every year before that I’ve more than tripled my salary on cases I’ve handled either primarily or exclusively, in addition to the work I’ve done on the partner’s cases and others in the office. But, much to my chagrin, the bonuses have been minimal - a couple grand this past year in spite of a phenomenal year for me. The previous year was my first significant bonus, netting about $12k.

I also get a company car (an Accord), and our firm has done a profit sharing retirement account contribution of 25% our base salaries three of the past five years - but the past two years has not made such a contribution, in spite of the partner declaring that they would. I decided to forego medical benefits as my wife works for a much larger company that offers a decent benefits package, and so we kept her medical coverage.

I suppose I had expected better; I am getting significant involvement in cases, have been second chair in some wrongful death trials, and I’m not hidden away in the basement never to speak to clients... but I’m getting the feeling I’m not getting my share on big cases where I’m the primary attorney. Perhaps hearing what else is going on out there might put things into perspective for me?

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Not sure if this helps or not but the attorneys at the firm I clerk at make a low base salary but get a 1/3 split for any cases they originate irrespective of whether or not they work on the case. Plus, they receive 1-3% for each case they exclusively work on. There's also a small, arbitrary bonus at the end of the year. 4-attorney shop. Catastrophic injury and mass torts.

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