The American Lawyer 2003 Associates Survey was published online last night (dated 10-01-03). With the boom days gone, “midlevel associates are getting serious about their firms, their experience, and their long-term visions for the rest of their legal careers.” According to the section entitled The New Lifers (by Laura Pearlman 10-01-03), many midlevel associates are no longer quibbling over quality of life. Instead, they want to build careers “and they’re willing to work long and hard to do so.”
The report surveyed thousands of mid-level associates from the top 158 firms in the nation. The article found that midlevel associates are getting serious about their firms, their experience, and their long-term visions for the rest of their legal careers. Survey findings include:
In the current cold economy, many midlevels have given up on looking for a new job or a fatter paycheck. Instead, they focus on getting senior-level responsibility and client contact.
Many firms that finished toward the top in our survey offer formal and continuous training and mentoring programs. Many, too, have full-time staffers in charge of professional development to help associates get the training they need Firms with lots of interesting work to spread down to the midlevel associated are among the highest ranked.
But despite the less exciting work and overall lack of responsibility that midlevels report, they seem more willing to grin and bear it than they have in years. Not in recent memory have our survey results depicted a more flexible — or tolerant — bunch. They are more willing to put up with the treatment received from partners and to stay despite prospects of higher salary elsewhere.\
Meanwhile, associates seem to have tempered their expectations for big money, with the current median total annual compensation just over $150,000.
Frequent readers of this web log may want to contrast these findings with the observations and opinions given by Prof. Patrick Schiltz, in an article summarized over the weekend in this post.
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