It doesn’t matter whether a firm has a banner year or suffers depressed profits, any big significant change in profits prompts partners to ask, “how will the firm treat me in compensation this year?” For many firms, this year-end promises to be a challenging compensation time.

In 2018, we wrote an article for The American Lawyer called “Managing Compensation Expectations in a Record Year,” in response to the extraordinary hours and profits firms were generating. As most leaders know or quickly discover, managing expectations is one of the most critical keys to successfully setting compensation. It is important in the good times when expectations can easily get out of control, but even more critical during bad or unsettled times when firms face more difficult decisions. While the techniques outlined in our 2018 article still apply, there are other issues prompted by the widely disparate workloads and soft profits.

Emerging Compensation Issues