Two-thirds of City partners are in favour of freezing associate pay in a bid to save money and stave off further redundancies, as Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer emerged this week as the first UK firm to break assistant lockstep.
Research by Legal Week over the past week for the Big Question survey found that most partners were in favour of a full salary freeze despite it requiring a temporary suspension of the traditional lockstep model that has seen associates progress annually through a firm’s pay bands.
