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Subject Expert
It’s wildly different from firm to firm. Below is a link to an explanation of how partner pay generally works.
As for these metrics, all three firms in which I’ve had equity used the same basic metrics to measure personal productivity - billing credit, originations credit, and personal collections.
Billing credit is mostly a measurement of who has the key client relationship. It can be shared but many clients have one billing partner for all of their matters.
Originations credit is a usually a measurement of whose expertise attracted the matter. It can also be shared, and often is when, for example, a client calls me and asks me to find someone at the firm to handle a matter outside my area of expertise. I connect one of my colleagues with the client. Without both my relationship and my colleague‘s expertise we would not have secured the engagement, so we split the originations 50-50. On some matters, originations might be split three, four, or even five ways, and either equal or unequal proportions. At the firms in which I have been partner, it’s really a matter of what the partners negotiate, and the firm culture.
Lastly, firms measure personal collections carefully. That’s how much money goes into the bank for each lawyers own personal work and is calculated at the lawyer’s rate times hours less hours not billed or collected.
How these metrics translate to partner compensation is highly dependent on the nature of the firm. Some “eat what you kill“ firms have very formulaic approaches. Other firms take a more holistic approach to compensation and therefore consider not only financial metrics but also such things as length of service, good firm citizenship, training, mentoring, for management, etc.
So the short answer is that unless you are at a formulaic for that those that pay solely by plugging numbers into an arithmetic formula, it’s not really possible to project our particular matter or metric impacts partner compensation.
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Subject Expert
That’s a universal truth. No one ever wants to go to management on a credit dispute.
This is absolutely firm dependent. In my firm, originating > managing > working. If you originate a million dollars and your other numbers i.e hours, profitability, etc are meeting expectations, you are an equity and you’ll make at least 200-300k more than the person with the million in managing or billing because you are unlikely to equity without the O numbers even if the other ones are stellar.
I was of counsel at an eat what you kill firm before going in-house for a client. I saw lots of hoarding of origination by partners.
One partner in our group instructed his assistant to give him 50% origination on all matters originated by his associates.
Mentor
If anyone wants to understand what eat what you kill can do to a firm, read about Project Rightsize and what followed it at a certain firm in NY that might have initials like Couldn’t Work There.