Big-Firm Associates: Why They Go and How to Keep Them

Even as associate salaries and bonuses soar ever higher, larger law firms in the U.S. are reported to lose at least 30 percent of associates after about three years. Big-firm associates may be a lost generation, say Ben W. Heineman Jr. and David B. Wilkins: a cohort of junior lawyers whose initial professional experience is extremely unsatisfying, who are turned off by the traditional rite of passage in a large firm, and who are not developing as legal professionals in the broadest sense of that phrase.