Associates associate time of year with two things: getting paid a lot of money and finally having the time to see your family. And for the associates at Cleary Gottlieb, they won’t have to worry about getting their money! The firm boasted an impressive $1,700,000,000 gross revenue in 2024 according to Am Law 100 and has no problem with sharing the wealth via bonuses and special bonuses. Here’s the scale:
Bonuses will be paid on the 19th of December! Yay money!
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s loop back to the seeing your family bit of the holidays. According to Above the Law tipsters, Cleary told associates to cancel any holiday plans they had — those hours aren’t going to bill themselves after all. The silver lining behind the golden handcuffs is that the firm also offered to reimburse the travel costs lost by the last minute cancellation. Associates without vacation plans were invited to make sure that they had a proper vacation scheduled for 2026. Hard way to find out that you’ll have to push off seeing your loved ones until Christmas, but at least Cleary put in the effort to soften the blow. If the kind words aren’t enough, at least you’ll have a nice set of $100s to dry those tears with.
We like hearing about bonuses almost as much as you enjoy spending them. As soon as your firm’s memo comes out, please email it to us (subject line: “[Firm Name] Bonus”) or text us (646-820-8477). Please include the memo if available. You can take a photo of the memo and send it via text or email if you don’t want to forward the original PDF or Word file.
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, is interested in critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
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