Legal News

The Mighty Are Humbled: Cravath Also Offers Associate Deferrals

By Ashby Jones

In April, we let you know a few of the names of people we’ve envied throughout our life.

Moments ago, we became aware of someone else we’d like to be: a law-school graduate slated to start at the venerable Cravath, Swaine & Moore this fall.

Here’s the kicker: We’d want to be one of those people slated to start at Cravath because, if we were, we actually wouldn’t have to start at Cravath at all. In fact, as Above the Law and Bloomberg are reporting, we could take $80,000, $1000 a month in loan-repayment assistance — and health-insurance to boot — and then go study ants in New Zealand. Or read the Great Books in Hawaii. Or do public-interest work in LA. Or just sit in our Brooklyn apartment watching Deadwood repeats and drinking really expensive gin.

That’s right — Cravath has joined the ranks of Skadden and other firms looking to trim down their labor force heading into the fall. It’s not just the ‘09ers who’re affected, either. Members of the class of 2010 at Cravath — that is, those folks serving as summer associates now — have had their start dates pushed back to the fall of 2011. While the ‘09ers have an option to be deferred, the delay is mandatory for the ‘10ers. And less lucrative — they’ll get only $65,000 for the year off (plus the health care and loan assistance). Those poor souls.

A memo sent to associates earlier today reads:

While the firm’s level of work is at or near its level before the continuing economic downturn, there are many more associates at the firm today than our plans anticipated, as the poor economy and the disruption at many financial institutions have reduced the rate at which our associates have left the firm for other opportunities,” the New York-based firm said in a memo to associates today.

Cravath’s 150-lawyer incoming class and summer associate class of 120 are “significantly larger than planned because the acceptance rate of our offers increased the size of those classes well beyond our expectations,” the memo said.

A spokeswoman for the firm declined to comment.

So what we want to know, LBers, is if faced with this choice, what do you do? How would you burn the $80k? Or, instead, would you decline and head off to Cravath to get your career (and along the way pull down $160k)?

Frankly, we can talk a big game about booze and HBO reruns, but putting ourselves in the shoes of our 26 year-old recently-minted, eager-beaver selves, we’re honestly not sure what we’d do. Talk to us.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 12, 2009 (boomark / email).