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How much does a Bay Street partner make?


keenerbeaver

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Rashabon
  • Lawyer
1 hour ago, CleanHands said:

Yes, who wouldn't love pouring over documents for 70 hours a week so that Walmart can pay fewer taxes and mining companies can exploit slave labour in Eritrea?

Oh, wait...literally every damn person on the planet.

This is the corporate law equivalent of pointing out lawyers that gleefully work to get rapists off by slut shaming the victims or what have you.

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CleanHands
  • Lawyer
22 minutes ago, Rashabon said:

This is the corporate law equivalent of pointing out lawyers that gleefully work to get rapists off by slut shaming the victims or what have you.

Whatever helps you mitigate the cognitive dissonance you must feel being a proud woke leftist while doing that work.

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Kimura
  • Lawyer
16 minutes ago, CleanHands said:

Whatever helps you mitigate the cognitive dissonance you must feel being a proud woke leftist while doing that work.

Someone needs to do it...that's what makes the world go round'

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Mountebank
  • Lawyer
2 hours ago, CleanHands said:

Yes, who wouldn't love pouring over documents for 70 hours a week so that Walmart can pay fewer taxes and mining companies can exploit slave labour in Eritrea?

Oh, wait...literally every damn person on the planet.

True, the 70 hours bit is brutal.

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GGrievous
  • Law Student
1 hour ago, Rashabon said:

This is the corporate law equivalent of pointing out lawyers that gleefully work to get rapists off by slut shaming the victims or what have you.

alleged rapists. 

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Mountebank
  • Lawyer
4 minutes ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

alleged Eritrean slaves. 

Why would the slaves be alleged Eritreans?

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BlockedQuebecois
  • Lawyer
5 minutes ago, Mountebank said:

Why would the slaves be alleged Eritreans?

You think the cutthroats at Fasken representing Nevsun are going to grant your notice to admit the slaves were Eritreans? 

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Rashabon
  • Lawyer
2 hours ago, CleanHands said:

Whatever helps you mitigate the cognitive dissonance you must feel being a proud woke leftist while doing that work.

I don't pretend my work has societal value. But you do yourself and your complaints no favours, nor help being taken seriously, when you reduce Bay Street to helping mining companies use Eritrean slave labour. Like I said, that reductive attitude can equally be applied to your favoured field with the gross defence lawyers out there - defence counsel aren't universally saints and there are gross ones out there and we've seen them all in the press over and over.

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Kimura
  • Lawyer
4 minutes ago, Rashabon said:

I don't pretend my work has societal value. But you do yourself and your complaints no favours, nor help being taken seriously, when you reduce Bay Street to helping mining companies use Eritrean slave labour. Like I said, that reductive attitude can equally be applied to your favoured field with the gross defence lawyers out there - defence counsel aren't universally saints and there are gross ones out there and we've seen them all in the press over and over.

But your work does have societal value...although it may not be readily apparent

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GGrievous
  • Law Student
13 minutes ago, Rashabon said:

defence counsel aren't universally saints and there are gross ones out there and we've seen them all in the press over and over.

Names? I'm not sure if you're saying they're "gross" for just who are they are as a person (because fair... there is one in particular that i've met recently that apparently does not believe in showers), or "gross" for defending a criminally charged person that you've decided should not be deserving of defence. 

Edited by Barry
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CleanHands
  • Lawyer
10 minutes ago, Rashabon said:

-Snip-

The work itself and the personalities doing the work are two different things. Unquestionably there are douchebag crim lawyers out there but that's hardly a refutation of any statements about the value of work in different areas.

I'm not even sure what we disagree about in light of your passing on defending the value of what you do.

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CleanHands
  • Lawyer
10 minutes ago, Barry said:

Names? I'm not sure if you're saying they're "gross" for just who are they are as a person, or "gross" for defending a criminally charged person that you've decided should not be deserving of defence. 

I mean, William Mastop was the on-call intelligence officer for the Greeks organized crime gang, obtaining disclosure and assisting them in deducing who CIs were in order to whack them. Justin Sidhu smuggled drugs to inmates in the Edmonton Remand Centre. Shawn Beaver plundered the trust account of a mentally ill homeless man with addiction issues so that he (Beaver) could party and look like a bigshot. Just to name a few examples off the top of my head.

If those were the kinds of folks he was alluding too, fair enough. I'm not claiming doing crim law makes someone a hero. If it was more along the lines of "Marie Henein was mean to Ghomeshi's accusers," then yeah, not so fair enough.

EDIT - Oh and just so I'm not picking on defence without Crown examples: George Dangerfield is behind four high-profile wrongful murder convictions and acknowledged cutting deals with criminally accused people to drop their charges in exchange for testimony and knowing that they lied on the stand, and not disclosing any of this to defence or correcting any of it.

Edited by CleanHands
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On 10/13/2021 at 2:25 PM, Jaggers said:

Most of them never retire. They die at their desks.

Don't the Bay Street firms force out partners at a certain age? I believe it's in the partnership agreement that you have to leave once you hit that age. What happens then?

 

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Rashabon
  • Lawyer
3 hours ago, Orbis said:

Don't the Bay Street firms force out partners at a certain age? I believe it's in the partnership agreement that you have to leave once you hit that age. What happens then?

 

Only some of them do. So they go to other firms or find something else to do.

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BlockedQuebecois
  • Lawyer
1 hour ago, Rashabon said:

Only some of them do. So they go to other firms or find something else to do.

Or take “of counsel” positions at their firm. 

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Mountebank
  • Lawyer
5 hours ago, Rashabon said:

Only some of them do. So they go to other firms or find something else to do.

What's the rationale for this? Other than the desire to keep old person stink out of the office I mean.

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BlockedQuebecois
  • Lawyer
1 hour ago, Mountebank said:

What's the rationale for this? Other than the desire to keep old person stink out of the office I mean.

It essentially just allows for the orderly execution of a succession plan and helps retain clients. If your firm has a mandatory retirement age, then the senior partners are going to work to transition clients over to younger partners as that age approaches. Without such a policy, you run the risk of the partner jealously guarding their clients (and thus their compensation) until they pass away or suddenly retire, at which point the client is much more likely to wander off to some other firm. A mandatory retirement policy might also help attract younger partners, who can expect to get compensated better as the person managing the client relationship than if they're simply doing the work on a senior partner's files.

It also preserves everyone's dignity if a partner starts to suffer from noticeable cognitive decline. 

The flip side is you run the risk of some partners leaving to firms without retirement ages, taking their clients with them. 

I don't think there's a big consensus in firms about whether or not mandatory retirement ages are net positive or not. 

Edited by BlockedQuebecois
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I suspect there is a huge variation in the number of weeks, but also in how unplugged someone gets while taking that vacation.

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37 minutes ago, Jaggers said:

also in how unplugged someone gets while taking that vacation.

Yeah, this is really the key indicator for lawyer vacations. I gave myself two weeks of vacation at the end of the summer, but only strung together a couple of days at a time where I wasn't monitoring voicemails and emails. It's not that restful if little demands are pinging away and releasing whatever stress hormones cause me to look like I'm aging in dog years. 

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Folks — hoping to reel this thread back in. I am curious as to how compensation works at the partner level. Not exactly in terms of actual $$, but more specifically, is it based on how many clients you bring in? Hours you work? 

Relatedly, can someone please kindly shed light on why one would want to become an equity partner at a firm in this day and age? Is it… worthwhile? 

Note: I am admittedly a tad jaded (COVID lawyering has been rough lol) and looking for good reasons to stay in private practice other than simply bringing home the big bucks. 

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BlockedQuebecois
  • Lawyer

What do you mean by “how does compensation work”? Do you mean how is the level of remuneration decided? If so, most (if not all) large firms have a compensation committee that will set compensation for all the partners in the firm. In general, the committee will consider how much business the partner brought in, how many billable hours they worked, and other contributions to the firm (such as serving on committees). They’ll allocate a certain number of units to each partner, and partners get compensated based on their unit holdings. 

Motivation to be a partner will vary, though money will obviously always be relevant. When you’re looking at making quintuple your salary as a partner compared to in house, it’s silly to suggest anyone would put that consideration aside. 

Outside of money, as a litigator there aren’t a lot of end game exit plans. And the in house options for litigators are, by and large, uninteresting to me. If I don’t make partner at a big firm, or if I decided I didn’t want to try for it, I would go to some smaller firm and end up being a partner there (or start my own firm). 

For practices with more exit options, some people still prefer being in private practice. I have friends who have worked in house and in private practice doing M&A or other corporate work and they’ve generally expressed the sentiment that private practice was more interesting, even if they prefer in house for the other advantages. 

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Pendragon
  • Lawyer
15 minutes ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

What do you mean by “how does compensation work”? Do you mean how is the level of remuneration decided? If so, most (if not all) large firms have a compensation committee that will set compensation for all the partners in the firm. In general, the committee will consider how much business the partner brought in, how many billable hours they worked, and other contributions to the firm (such as serving on committees). They’ll allocate a certain number of units to each partner, and partners get compensated based on their unit holdings. 

Motivation to be a partner will vary, though money will obviously always be relevant. When you’re looking at making quintuple your salary as a partner compared to in house, it’s silly to suggest anyone would put that consideration aside. 

Outside of money, as a litigator there aren’t a lot of end game exit plans. And the in house options for litigators are, by and large, uninteresting to me. If I don’t make partner at a big firm, or if I decided I didn’t want to try for it, I would go to some smaller firm and end up being a partner there (or start my own firm). 

For practices with more exit options, some people still prefer being in private practice. I have friends who have worked in house and in private practice doing M&A or other corporate work and they’ve generally expressed the sentiment that private practice was more interesting, even if they prefer in house for the other advantages. 

What are the other in-house options like for litigators? And how does the compensation, work, and work-life balance compare in Big law to litigation boutiques like Paliare Roland, Tyr LLP, Kastner Lam, Lenczner Slaght, Lax O'Sullivan, Hunter Litigation, Stockwoods, etc.? By smaller firms, do you mean the litigation boutiques?

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