London Law Firms Face a Reckoning in 2023 After This Year’s ‘Pay Scale Mess’
- Pay packages surge was out-of-whack with slowing deals revenue
- New London law recruits lured with offers of £100,000 a year
This article is for subscribers only.
London’s biggest law firms paid generously to secure the brightest young recruits they could this year. Meeting those salary pledges next year will be a lot tougher with revenues from deal making expected to slow dramatically.
Many of the UK’s top law firms upped salaries for newly-qualified lawyers to as much as £100,000 ($120,600) this year to narrow the gap with top US firms in London. But the value of initial public offerings in the UK capital, a key source of cash for law firms which advise on these deals, fell in the first half of 2022 to the lowest since 2008. With the UK already on the brink of recession, a reckoning of sorts may be coming.