Differences between US firms and UK firms in London

Multiple posts from different people:



The unfortunate reality that law firms have to face is that some clients are happy to pay a *lot* more for the same quality and quantity of work than other clients. The US firms in the UK can pay more for associates because they're able to have a higher proportion of fee-insensitive clients, like those in private equity. The magic circle meanwhile are big and "full service", meaning that their business model requires them to do much cheaper work to utilise lawyers across the business.

Traditionally, they've tried to square the circle by paying everyone at the associate level a pretty similar wedge, regardless of the enormous differences in fee income. This no longer works and has resulted in hemorrhaging to the US firm. Lockdown was an issue: associates were isolated and beasted at all hours in their homes, and the "we expect you to be available all hours" culture has become so much worse over the last two years.

Now they're risking disunity and resentment from those who work just as many hours (especially from the specialists all over the firm who won't be compensated but who help make the case for having those PE deals done in the magic circle rather than at the US firms).


If the balance works for people though, good luck to them. It is - in my view - unsustainable for those who want to have children, but for single people **who genuinely find the work interesting** (crucial caveat!), it is perfect.

US associates expect to work longer hours: we're paid more money than Croesus. Some may regard this as a Faustian pact, but it's clear on the face of it what we're signing up for, and it's a personal choice.

Just as I don't criticise those who choose to prioritise having kids, and domestic bliss etc. because that's personal choice, I don't regard as reasonable those who criticise those of us who aspire to bill c2,500 hours/year. There's room for everyone, there doesn't need to be a template from which those who deviate are excoriated (whether for 'not working hard enough', or working 'too hard').

I like this quote from a Times interview with Sherlock actor Andrew Scott on 2 June 2019: “In a world full of massive innovation, there seems to be a limited prototype about what happiness in life is. My biggest liberation, or emancipation, has been to realise that... You just create it! It’s up to you.”

Life would be very dull if we were all the same. It would be extraordinary dull if we all aspired to work as hard as associates in US law firms! :)




One aspect of working in a US firm that is weirdly liberating is (mostly) everyone's acceptance of what they have signed up for. At my previous firm there was always so much bitching about workloads, having to pick up something over the weekend, evening calls etc (with a constant undertone of "I could just go to a US firm and earn 50-80% more for the same work"). That tends to fall away at a US firm (where else can you go?) and everyone just sucks it up and get on with it (I feel a bit less guilty asking a 25 y/o NQ to work over the weekend when they're on £150k than I did at my old shop where they would be on half that).

There is a bit more expectation that you handle your matters while you're on holiday but I probably prefer doing a bit of work here and there on holiday than the nightmare of trying to hand over to someone else (and the flipside is that you don't tend to be handed someone else's matters when they go on holiday..).


Roffers love to bash the idea of working at US firms but here is what it’s really like:


Money: a senior associate at a US firm is getting circa £250k + 80k bonus. That’s around £10k take home per month and a £45k take home lump sum in bonus. It’s more than “a few grand” the MC would have you believe isn’t worth it.

Hours: lots of US firms don’t have any targets at all. The average billable hours recorded at my shop is 2,000 hours. This is a constant solid work day and doesn’t equate to getting “beasted”. You don’t work longer hours nor have less of a life than anybody at a MC/SC firm.

Holidays: this is where the MC folks have it better. US firms have a lower holiday entitlement + leaner teams means you’re never really “on holiday” but monitoring emails is no problem.

Pace: the pace is twice as fast at US firms. You need to be responding to clients within a few hours (even if just a holding response) and turning docs within 24hs. We will get the first draft loan agreement / SPA out within 3 working days. It’s fast and furious and you cannot hide.

Culture and profession: US firms tend to attract more entrepreneurial, less “traditional” types. You’ll find the stuffy oxbridge nerds in the safety of the MC but at US firms you have a real nice mix of people who trained at regional firms, low profile firms, city firms and international firms. Most people are v “normal”.

if you’re a self confident lawyer with ambition and who thrives on a fast paced / tight deadline enviro and want to earn £££s then this is the place for you. People happy to stay in their comfort zone need not apply.

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1. You have to work harder because there are fewer people. The US firms do not work on a geared model and partner remuneration is such that it is better for the partner to do tonnes of hours than to have a team beneath them. That creates the hours culture. And so with fewer people to produce the same work this of course means a couple of things:
a) the lawyers are not often experts at what they are doing
b) there are sometimes not enough hours in the day to do what they are doing
c) the firms can afford to pay more because they have fewer associates

In terms of the money and the hours culture - this also comes from the clients - in the US the bar rules and compliance rules are such (and the business culture is such) that firms don't tender work in the same way - the business person is allowed to go to their law firm of choice and that law firm has no reason to discount - so the firm will get paid on a time spent basis. This leads to a high hours culture rather than a drive for efficiency but also very high profitability.

Culture is derived from reward and in US firms partners are rewarded on 2 things - origination and hours. So once you bring a client in, there is no handing it round to anyone else - you want to keep the client and it means that rather than specialists you see much more generalist approach from the perspective of the lead partner then using senior associates with the actual experience - as this is the only way the partner will get recognition. Team work is not rewarded.

US firms typically have very short notice periods for partners - some are as little as a couple of weeks. Compare that to UK firms which often have 1 year. This is to manage the institutionalization of clients. If you know you can be out of the door in a week, there is no way you are going to share your contacts in the same way than you would if it was rewarded. At UK firms the firm tends to have the relationship - although there are obviously relationship partners, the larger clients rarely leave when the partner leaves.


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The biggest problem is that people get trapped by the money. They acquire a lifestyle, the house the kids the mortgage the school fees which enslave them.

I saw it time and time again in the Middle East.. people who were desperately unhappy but had a closet full of Chanel handbags.

I’ve also laid in a hospital bed, dying,  with a 97% chance I’d never leave the hospital again... all the things you own in the world mean nothing if you’ll never see them again. The only way the $$ mattered was it could pay to keep me alive.


it was a great wake up call for me.

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I never understand how and why high earning senior associates /partners feel the need to spend at least in line with their new found riches, then complain about being at work all the time , having no money, and ever increasing debt.

Ditch the new massive new house, with excess space for the two of you, with the £1mm plus mortgage. And the new range rover and Aston, eating out four times a week, 2k hand made suits, first/business class flights, 30k holidays, and so on and so forth. They mostly seem utterly miserable.

An acquaintance got the nod recently in a mid tier city firm , his fiancee is a decent bazza doing pi,clin neg, and employment. They have no kids, and she decides to go part time and do a full time PhD. They move from a very nice 1400 square foot 3/4 bed terraced house, to a 2750 square foot 3 floor town house with a 1.5 million quid mortgage. Then come the new cars, the expensive holidays, etc, etc, and this is after a year of him being made a junior partner. He looks shattered and miserable , working all hours and not seeing the benefit of the extra cash. Utterly pointless.

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It's often the case that those doing these type of hours don't have much going on socially and  aren't deprived of much by working all the time. I was pretty amazed by the absence of friends/social plans of people I worked with years ago when I was at a US firm. I'm not sure what way round the cause/effect was though.

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my two cents as someone who has never worked in a US firm but has instructed their fair share:

hours - US firms treat billable hours more expansively. i worked at an MC firm where the partners were at one point concerned that the associates under-were recording their hours (as the associates were worried that their supervising partners would question why it had taken them so long to do x, y or z). during a discussion on what was acceptable to bill, one partner addressed the question of whether you could bill for time spent thinking about the client's matter while sitting in the bath re-enacting the Battle of the Nile with rubber ducky. my impression of US firms is that this is a no-brainer (and they would probably bill you for ducky's time too). so hitting those 2,000+ targets may not be as big a step up as those MC associates billing 1,800 might think.

holidays - i worked at a place (in-house) which had an "always available" culture - evenings, weekends, holidays - and it wasn't much fun (although other aspects of the job made up for it). the GC used to joke* that holidays were location swaps. i remember the holiday i took immediately after leaving, and realised just how little i had really managed to relax on any of the holidays i had taken while i was in the job. if you start your career at a place with that culture and think that monitoring emails on holiday (and all other times you aren't in the office) is the norm and "not a big problem", then well, I guess I would refer you to Scylla's comments above.

* he wasn't actually joking

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" the most popular destination for Magic Circle firm leavers in 2020 was US law firms in the UK, absorbing 56.8% of leavers, while non-Magic Circle UK firms absorbed a total of 36.6%. Only 6.6% of these leavers left to join another Magic Circle firm." (4 February 2021)

https://pirical.com/blog/magic-circle-firms-are-losing-lawyers-to-us-firms

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US firms will continue to dominate London, and the Magic Circle firms will never compete with US firms:

- US clients prefer law firms which can act globally for them (particularly with the growth in international regulatory and prosecutorial coordination and cooperation).

- English firms have been notoriously unsuccessful penetrating the US, and New York in particular, markets. US clients therefore prefer US firms. (English firms also don't have name recognition in the US.)

- US clients are more willing to pay higher legal fees overall, and they do. This is particularly the case for litigation and arbitration. One might objectively deprecate the USA's culture of litigation, but it is profitable :)

- US firms don't indulge the touchy-feely, wishy-washy, namby-pamby, soft-hearted, soft-headed nonsense that "all our staff are equally valuable", because it's simply untrue. They pay far lower salaries to fungible, replaceable support staff with limited skill sets and low barriers to entry for their replacements. This releases more money to pay fee earners.

- US firms don't have Rolls Royce cultures such as: their own restaurants, regular client functions, elaborate catering both for those client functions and even catering for internal training sessions, vast IT teams and resources, etc. This also releases more money to pay fee earners.

- The Magic Circle firms are full service, whereas US firms cherry pick the most profitable practice areas (and clients). Full service firms necessarily cross-subsidise less profitable practice areas, which drags down remuneration.

- US firms are pretty brutal at all levels: if NQs don't perform in their first 6 months, they're gone. Likewise for more senior lateral hires, and even senior associates if partnership isn't looking likely.

- US associates know that we're paid more and therefore we're expected to be available 7 days/week, including while on holiday (not necessarily for lengthy, substantive work, but certainly to address queries, etc.). I've never turned on my out of office reply, except when I was on a remote trip away from mobile phone signals. This enables us to have smaller teams, and thus do more work with fewer people: no one is ever really on holiday.

- US associates expect to work longer hours: we're paid more money than Croesus. Some may regard this as a Faustian pact, but it's clear on the face of it what we're signing up for, and it's a personal choice.

 - The Magic Circle firms are huge and the US firms are smaller. There simply aren't the opportunities for more than a certain % of Magic Circle associates to move, so Magic Circle firms don't need to match US firms' salaries - most of their associates can't move. (I'm not even arguing that the best associates leave Magic Circle firms, simply that numerically, only a small % can have the opportunity, entirely independently of merit.)

I'm not criticising Magic Circle firms here, far from it. I trained at one, before moving on qualification, and I liked both the firm and everyone who I worked with. I just don't think that they're comparable. That's not a value judgment: London needs full service firms which do a wide range of work, including less profitable work. The focus on PEP and associate salaries should not be the myoptic obsession which it has become.

Finally, just as I don't criticise those who choose to prioritise having kids, and domestic bliss etc. because that's personal choice, I don't regard as reasonable those who criticise those of us who aspire to bill c2,500 hours/year. There's room for everyone, there doesn't need to be a template from which those who deviate are excoriated (whether for 'not working hard enough', or working 'too hard').



It’s impossible for the Magic Circle to compete with this. Hence they tell their people that every one of the thousands of US firm associates in London (who they are working across from on most deals) works 3000 hours a year. In reality, the Magic Circle is overconcentrated in low-margin work (employment, pensions, investment grade debt, blockchain, ESG, Islamic finance), strategically failed 10 years ago to seriously pivot from FTSE companies and UK/European banks to private equity, and their unproductive top-of-lockstep grey hairs are sucking up £2-2.5m a year while generating precisely no business. In summary, Magic Circle partners want their associates to believe that the Magic Circle’s business model is as profitable as the elite US firms’, with the only difference being that US associates work double the hours for double the salary. This is nothing more than gaslighting associates into staying put.