No Equity, No Problem: Our Attorney Pay Plan, with Ben Gideon and Jeff Wright

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Welcome to Elawvate, Build and Grow

Your Law Firm. I am Jeff Wright,

chief operating officer at Gideon Asen,

and as always joined by Ben

Gideon, owner, manager, partner,

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The reason why they're near and dear to

my heart, they found me for this job.

I tell Ben every day, best job I

ever had. How are you today, Ben?

Trying to organize my life

so I can go on vacation.

Vacation as always comes

at an inopportune time.

I'm optimistic I can wrap things up and

get out the door, so excited for that.

I think you can. It's been a busy time,

but well-deserved vacation. I mean,

you haven't had a vacation in

two or three weeks, I think.

It's been at least a week or two.

You must be exhausted. Today's

topic, attorney compensation.

So I think a very important topic,

and our firm, I believe Ben,

does it a little bit differently than the

traditional plaintiff firms out there.

And we want to talk about it and give

you some ideas on what we do to attract

the type of employees that

we want and how it's working

for us.

It's a really important topic.

We had mentioned it during a

prior podcast episode where

we said we would get to it.

And we actually heard from a

frustrated listener who as a regular

listener of the show and said, "Hey,

you guys said you were going

to cover attorney compensation.

Where's that episode?

We haven't heard it yet." So we wanted

to make sure we circled back and covered

that.

What I wanted to do is just start by

giving kind of a big picture overview

of it.

We'll get into the very specifics of how

our particular compensation structure

works,

but it really has to be guided by mission

and principles in terms of what is it

you're trying to achieve?

Who are you trying to attract and

retain with your compensation model?

I once happened to be in Orlando, Florida,

and I had lunch with an attorney

down there named John Morgan who many

may know. He's on advertisements

and billboards all over the country.

He runs Morgan & Morgan,

which is the largest personal

injury law firm in America.

And we are talking a lot about

attracting and retaining lawyers.

I think at one point John owned

100% of his company himself or

maybe with his brother who runs

his sort of back office functions.

And then gradually I think they have

brought other people in sort of as equity

participants over the years.

I can't speak in great detail

to the Morgan & Morgan model,

but one thing he told me was

everybody needs two things.

They need love and they need money.

And I think it's important

to keep that in mind.

They're both critically important.

Either one alone is not enough

to attract and retain the best

talent. The love part

comes into feeling valued,

feeling important, being

able to do important work,

satisfying work,

having a team around you that

allows you to reach your highest

potential, that supports you. I mean,

as Jeff and I were just joking around,

also allows you to enjoy your work

because we only live once and we all

spend most of our adult lives working.

And if you don't find joy

or satisfaction in that,

no amount of money can

really make up for that.

So the love part is a topic for a

different podcast or maybe a whole nother

podcast franchise where I'll talk

to you about my strategies for love,

intimacy, and relationships. That

will not be a well subscribed to show.

There's not of a particular authority

on it, but I do think at our firm,

we accomplish that goal pretty

well by making everybody

feel appreciated and valued and

hoping to build out structures and

systems that allows people to achieve

their highest and best use so they're not

mired in bullshit,

but able to do the things that

bring them satisfaction and joy.

For lawyers,

a lot of that depends on having access

to the kind of work they want to do.

One thing Morgan & Morgan can offer top

lawyers is we have really good cases

and they can get the cases

because they do the marketing.

So many lawyers are motivated to want

to work on really good high quality

cases. Our firm is very fortunate in

having many of those types of cases.

The other part of that is particularly

for a plaintiff contingent fee firm,

but probably true for every firm,

the quality of the work you have

does translate quite directly to the

compensation because if your

overall business model is not

economically successful,

you don't generate the kind of cash

and revenue you need to pay people.

Pretty simple, right? If

you have really good work,

a good steady pipeline of work,

if a lawyer is comparing the opportunities

at your firm versus a different

firm that doesn't have opportunities

to the same quality work,

even if the compensation structure might

be more advantageous at a competitor

firm, but they don't have the work,

overall they may be doing much better

at a firm where maybe they're getting a

slightly smaller percentage,

but it's a smaller percentage of much

bigger pie. So that kind of goes to the

love side. Let's talk about money

because at the end of the day,

people need money.

People deserve to be well paid

for their time to reflect their

real value added to a business.

And it quickly becomes apparent if a

business is not willing to pay people

what they're really worth.

The generosity of the

executive compensation plan

translates to better

people or better companies,

which I thought was very interesting.

And part of that is if you are

hiring the kind of people that

require money to motivate,

you're hiring the wrong kind of people

to begin with because what you want are

people that are motivated by

the mission and by the work.

They also need to be paid and

appropriately compensated.

But after whatever that threshold

of appropriate compensation is,

adding incremental compensation

to that in the study Jim Collins

references in his book did not produce

better companies or better people. So I'm

going to just stop there first

with that whole overview. Jeff,

thoughts from your extensive

experience on just those big

picture items?

I love that you hit on the culture and

the love piece because at the end of

the day, people can be

overcompensated for the job,

but if the job is a place that

they do not want to be at,

that's only going to last so long and

it's not going to translate into the type

of production or the type

of employee that you want.

The compensation is always tricky

because I've found there's a finite

amount of really good attorneys out

there that we want to have as part of the

team,

and we have a very well-defined hiring

process that we've spoken about in the

past. And I think one thing, I

don't want to say that handicaps us,

and you can probably speak to this, Ben,

when you and Taylor started the firm,

you made a conscious decision

to not have a path to equity

partnership, which I think traditionally,

I mean me being a non-attorney,

my mindset is traditionally

somebody starts at a firm,

they're an associate, maybe they are a

senior associate in four or five years,

and then they have an opportunity

for an equity partnership,

they can buy in. And that's kind of the

traditional path that you and Taylor

chose to not go that route.

And we had to structure our

salaries and our bonus plan to

probably compensate for that to a certain

extent because there's no path for

that. So I guess what was your mindset

with Taylor structuring it that way?

Yeah,

and that's why I mentioned at the outset

that you have to start with what is

your overarching goal and your mission

in terms of developing a compensation

plan because you could have a traditional

firm model where there's a pathway to

equity partnership. And at some

point when you make partner,

you have an ownership interest,

equity interest in the

profits of the firm.

That brings with a series

of considerations and issues

that are unique to that

model. That was the model I

came from in my prior firm.

And what I found, there's a

lot of benefits to that model,

which is that that's an easy

way to attract and retain

top talent because there's obviously that

carrot that you can offer that at the

end of that arduous path

up the steep mountain,

when you get to the peak,

you now have that professional

accolade and accomplishment

and you have that equity that so many

people appreciate and would like to

enjoy someday. The downside to

that model is that as you start to

make more equity partners

in an organization,

the ownership gets quite diffuse

and there can be a complacency that

sets in. There's an economic principle.

I'm forgetting the name of it.

You learn it in microeconomics. I think

it's agency cost maybe is the concept.

But the idea is that if you

have nobody who has predominant

ownership interest in something and

everybody only has a small piece,

nobody is highly motivated

to go that extra mile,

make that extra sacrifice to

make the firm work. For instance,

if you are a 10% or 20% owner and your

partners are enjoying their weekends at

home with their families,

why would you be burning the

midnight oil sitting in the office?

Why would you be working

nights and weekends?

Why would you be taking on additional

stress and anxiety because you only

enjoy 10 or 20% of that?

You're giving away 80%.

That's why somebody like Morgan & Morgan,

you've got a guy like John Morgan who's

kind of a force of nature who I'm sure

has worked 80-hour weeks for 40 years,

but he enjoys the vast majority of

the fruits of that labor himself,

so he's motivated to do

that. And in my old firm,

that's what I noticed that there were

some of us, I'm just built this way,

that generally work

hard and always take on

sacrifice, go above and beyond. And

some people just didn't want to do that.

That kind of equity, you could

have more or less equity,

but ultimately there is that

agency cost problem of since nobody

owns it,

nobody is as motivated to kill

themselves to make the business

successful. So I noticed that issue of

sort of a institutional complacency.

And there's also from a management side,

the ability to make fast,

nimble decisions depends

on having a streamlined

process for that,

not management by committee. And you can

become paralyzed from inaction if you

have too many people at the

table, all who have a voice.

And if someone's an equity

owner in a business,

it's hard not to give them a voice,

at least in major decisions like that.

So you're right, when Taylor

and I started this firm,

and I think it was more

important to me than to Taylor,

he had only been at that firm a few

years and had actually not been a partner

there. He was an associate when

he left to start this firm,

so he didn't quite have

the same experience.

But having been in a place where

I felt like I was kind of killing

myself to build the institution and to

make it successful and work and saw some

of my colleagues who I really liked

but just didn't have that same goal,

I didn't want to be back in an environment

where I was giving away my equity

ever again. So one of our fundamental

principles in starting this firm was,

as long as I'm here and alive and working,

I don't intend to give

away any of my equity.

So I think that's been a very good

decision and it's worked out well.

But then that creates that

problem you identified of, okay,

if you're not willing

to give people equity,

what can you give them

to attract and retain the

very best talent and

most talented lawyers?

So I'll stop there for your comments and

then we can get into the details of how

we addressed that problem.

And I think a lot of hiring and

compensation. Well, the compensation,

most people are thinking on the

hiring side, what do I have to offer,

whether it's benefit or salary or

bonuses to get this individual on board?

But you've mentioned the

word retention a lot,

and I think that gets lost

in the shuffle. I mean,

getting someone on board is great and

it's a challenge and you want to make sure

you make the correct hiring decision,

but the retention is probably

the most important part of that.

How do you keep that individual

that you worked really hard to get?

You can't put a price on the hundreds

of hours of training and onboarding and

integrating them.

How do you retain that employee

for ideally as long as you want to

have them as part of the firm? It

not only comes back to the culture,

but it does come back to the compensation.

And if they can't get an

equity partner, what

are you offering them?

And how can their compensation be

tied to their performance and the

firm's performance appropriately

to ensure that the money part

of their concerns is

addressed appropriately?

I think the way you and

Taylor have structured it,

our last iteration of the attorney

bonus plan had to have had

25 or 30 versions before

it was rolled out.

And we met for,

I don't know how many meetings we had

on it before we rolled it out. A lot.

Yeah.

And that's because the last iteration of

what we tried to do was very ham-handed

and poorly executed,

and we didn't want to have

that problem repeat itself.

So we were much more deliberate and much

more thoughtful this time to try to get

it right. But just back to

your point about retention,

and it's worth mentioning,

the compensation is obviously

a huge part of the retention.

That's sort of the carrot of

what somebody, if they stay,

is entitled to enjoy for their

compensation and benefits.

There's also maybe more

of a stick you might say,

which is it's not as

pleasant a thing to consider,

but I think it's extremely important,

something that I recognize the

importance of when I left my last firm,

and that is to have a really locked,

solid employment agreement

with your lawyers.

The agreement we had with my

former firm was not well written to

protect them from us leaving,

to protect their assets,

to protect their valuable cases,

their relationships with referring

attorneys and clients. And so just

recognizing that it's a fact of

life, that you can hire somebody,

invest in them, prop them up, give

them opportunities and resources,

and then they can decide someday maybe

the grass is greener on the other side of

the road and they want to leave and

compete with you across the street.

You really have to have a solid

bulletproof employment agreement with

all of your lawyers. And

ours is pretty stringent,

but it's just that concept that

good fences make better neighbors.

Putting that in place creates the rules

and the expectations very clearly for

people from the outset,

and it protects us against

the worst scenarios that one

could anticipate of a lawyer trying to

leave and steal clients from the firm or

steal cases. I was very fortunate,

and this is something I would

encourage every lawyer to consider,

but we've had Shane Inspector

on my other podcast,

and he's a partner and owner of one of

the most successful plaintiff's firms in

the country,

Klein Inspector out of Philadelphia.

You don't have to reinvent the wheel.

He was kind enough to share with

me their employment contract,

and I used that as a model for ours.

We did tweak and change

it to meet our own needs,

but that's one element you want to

have in place along with a solid

compensation plan to deal with

the issue of retention and

create disincentives for

people to leave under adverse

conditions.

I just wanted to say, it

was so important to us.

Obviously we got a very strong

draft to work from, made our tweaks,

but we still, it was so important.

We took the extra step and we used a

third-party employment lawyer and sent it

to them and made sure,

especially with it coming from

Pennsylvania and we're up here in Maine,

that it made sense for

our state and everything,

and it was rock solid.

So take the time if

there's some extra expense,

and you should send it to someone.

If you're not an employment lawyer,

get it in the hands of one and make

sure that's perfected to cover yourself.

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As an owner, you should not feel shy

about having a strong employment contract.

The people you're bringing in, you are

handing off your most valuable assets to,

which are your cases, your clients, and

your relationships with other lawyers.

You're also mentoring them, you're

making them better. I mean, in our case,

we promote them.

We pay for article placements so that

they can have bylines under their

names and photographs

and published articles.

We pay for them to travel all

over the country to go to CLEs.

We pay for their membership in

bar associations and groups.

We encourage them to build a franchise,

to develop their reputations and names,

but all for the benefit

ultimately of the institution.

And if you were to invest all that in

somebody and then they would take that and

leave,

I think it's only fair that the

assets remain with your firm

as much as a contract can protect

you from that. You just can't

have somebody stealing your

work product, your assets.

And I should say there's nobody in

our firm I worry about that with,

and that's part of having a culture of

getting the right people in the door,

but you're just better to be

safe than sorry on that front.

So moving on to the

compensation plan itself,

I had mentioned that we kind

of bungled this the first time.

So just the background is

when we started the firm,

it was just my partner and I.

We have an arrangement in

our own partnership agreement

about the distribution

of our equity that only

applies to the two of us.

When we started to bring in non-partner,

non-equity owners of the firm, we

didn't have a plan for that initially.

We weren't intentionally

planning to hire people.

When we first started hiring people,

we had enough work. People came,

wanted jobs, we found the right people,

we started to build out.

We negotiated salaries.

There was no particular bonus. The

bonus was at the discretion of us,

Taylor and I. And at the end

of the year, we would meet,

discuss the particular lawyer,

and based on the success of our firm in

the year and their contributions to it,

we would bonus people. That's kind of

how it worked. At some point though,

after having a couple of lawyers,

non-owner lawyers in the firm,

we started to come to the belief

that that wasn't going to work

longer term because these lawyers

were working on cases that we

were settling for multi

seven-figure, eight-figure amounts.

They could see what that was

producing for revenue to the firm.

And they're very smart people.

It wasn't going to be long before

they realized that the, frankly,

pittance we were paying them at the time

in terms of just a flat salary was not

really appropriate in light of

their value added to the results we

were obtaining. Rather than wait for

somebody to approach us about that and to

be pissed off or frustrated about

it, we wanted to get out ahead of it.

And so nobody had asked for anything more.

Nobody had said they were dissatisfied

with their pay or the plan.

We affirmatively went to

our associates and said,

"We want to share more of our profits

with you. We think you deserve it.

We want to be fairer to you,

and we want to develop a plan for that."

Our initial plan for that had to do

with segregating a certain

amount of the revenue from our

cases,

and then based on somebody's

work on those cases,

allocating some bonus amount

to them at the end of the year.

But we hadn't thought out the

specific numbers very carefully.

Started to go down that road. In year one,

we ended up giving one of our lawyers

who was involved in a $10 million case

settlement, a very significant bonus,

multiples of her base salary and

a bigger bonus than probably any

associate in the state of Maine had

received that year or maybe ever.

But it wasn't met with

the positive feedback or

happiness for receiving that that

we expected because despite the size

of the bonus,

it actually didn't fully come up to the

level of what we had sort of put in our

plan for how we were

thinking about organizing it.

It was basically we have this pool of

money and based on what percentage of the

work of that case you

did versus other people,

you can get everything in that

pool or only a portion of the pool.

We gave the person a portion of the pool,

about a third of what was in the so-called

pool, which was a very big number,

and we had a rationale for why we did

that, but it all seemed kind of arbitrary.

So rather than a very high

bonus engendering goodwill,

it seemed that we were being

victims of our own good deed

by creating a system that seemed arbitrary

and capricious. Every time we were

going to bonus somebody,

there was no clear transparency

or metric that one could look at

to see if that was the right

number, too high, too low.

And we recognized that year

in and year out in every case,

we are now going to be

faced with developing what

would appear to be somewhat

arbitrary bonus numbers,

creating the risk that no one was going

to be happy no matter what we did.

But also if we made people

happy in that arbitrary way,

we were also not being fair to the firm

because we would be overcompensating

people relative to their real worth,

which was just the truth of it.

There's an intrinsic

worth that somebody has.

If you are paying them multiples of that,

then you're not a good manager of your,

you're not being a smart owner or manager.

So we faced that really big

tension of it was our goal to be

generous. Our operating principle was

to be a little more generous in every

decision than we had to be, always to

err on the side of being extra generous,

say five or 10% premium above

what would be appropriate for

bonus compensation. But we

weren't doing 100% over,

200% over. Our decision seemed arbitrary.

It was backfiring on us. Our bonus

plan was developing ill will.

It was developing uncertainty

because nobody knew what to expect.

And we realized we had made a huge

mistake actually. And at the same time,

it created an expectation that once you

create, it's very hard to dial back,

right? Somebody's making X and then you

promise them they're happy making X.

You promise them 10X and then you give

them 3X and they're really unhappy about

3X. Where they were happy at X,

they would've been happy at 2X if

that's what you had promised them,

but by promising them 10X,

you can never dial it back to 2X and make

them happy again. So this was where we

were at that moment in time before he

came to the firm and helped us develop our

current compensation plan.

So I'll stop there again for comments

and then we'll talk about the current

iteration of the plan.

I think the big words that you hit that,

I don't want to say resentment is a

strong word and that's not what it was,

but the uncertainty that that plan

had where nothing was definitive,

people were guessing on

what they were going to get.

Everyone has a number in their mind,

and if they weren't getting that

number that was a pure guess.

It was creating some tension and

uncertainty is the biggest thing.

I think the plan that we've

landed on that we've had in place,

actually it's been in place this year,

2026 is when we started it, is

a very well though-out plan.

It's very definitive. I mean,

any attorney could go in there and

based upon knowing the production

numbers of their team and our firm,

land on almost an exact number

of what they're going to get.

One of the governing principles of

the new plan, unlike the old plan,

was complete transparency, not

just transparency for individuals,

but across the board.

So there's been a lot of social studies

and data on the idea that workers are

happier when there's

complete transparency,

even if they know their relative

compensation relative to other

people. It doesn't tend to engender the

bad will because people are going to

make assumptions about things that are

probably worse than they are if you don't

have complete transparency.

I should say that it's probably not

necessary to have transparency among

different categories of

employees. For instance,

our attorney compensation plan is

shared with all of the attorneys.

The spreadsheet that shows what

everybody is paid and how they reach that

number, it is not shared

with the non-attorney staff.

Because it's apples and oranges,

and I don't think there's a reason to

do that. I don't think there's a benefit

in doing that. But just focused

on the attorney compensation now.

So principle number one

is complete transparency.

Principle number two is predictability

so that the lawyer knows based on

their contributions to

each year's revenues,

and that specifically is the fees

generated by their team and their

work and by the firm as a whole.

They can plug those numbers into

our spreadsheet and determine

exactly what they're going

to make in that year.

It is not subject to

additional discretion.

It is not subject to arbitrary

decision-making by owners or

anybody else.

Now that doesn't mean that

that compensation structure

does not itself have

room to bonus people higher or

lower based on criteria that we

set. And I'll explain how.

And I should back up and say that we

are more than willing to share our plan,

our spreadsheet,

and all the details of it with anybody

who wants it. Just like transparency in

terms of our employees, there's

nothing we try to hide about it.

When we are recruiting for a job,

we send it out to the lawyer who we're

recruiting so that they can know in

advance of coming what

exactly the compensation plan

here is and how it works.

Let me describe kind of in

general terms how it works.

So our attorneys are all

paid some base salary.

That base salary is intended to

be amount of money that covers.

It's not an insignificant base salary.

I mean, it's a six-figure number,

but it is not intended to be the majority

of the way they get compensated if

our firm is doing well

and they're doing well.

It's kind of just a base amount that,

especially for newer lawyers

before they've started to

make their large bonuses,

can cover basic living expenses and

so forth. That base salary goes up

incrementally and then cap at

a number that's pretty modest.

So the advantage to that as a

firm is that we are not heavily

exposed in terms of

cashflow on lawyer salaries.

If our firm is not successful,

if we are not generating

revenue off of our casework,

if there's a huge economic downturn,

there's a cap on that cashflow

need to pay lawyers that's pretty

modest in terms of the economics

of our firm as a whole.

So that's principle one, modest base

salary. That salary, I should say,

is not a draw, it is an actual salary.

They don't lose it later,

but it is capped at what would be

a pretty low number overall for the

economics. That's point one.

The second part of the compensation

structure is what we call the team

bonus.

So our firm is segregated into

different teams. We have four

teams basically up for the lawyers.

We have three different trial teams,

which handle all of our litigated

cases that go into suit,

that are litigated and may go to trial.

Each of those teams is comprised

of two attorneys, a paralegal,

and a legal assistant.

Those teams each have cases that are being

managed by those teams.

And when those cases resolve either

by verdict or by settlement and

generate fees,

that goes into that team's

fee accrual number for the

year.

There is a threshold number that's

frankly pretty high that we expect the

teams to meet every year because we give

them extremely good cases and a lot of

resources and support. They should be

able to generate a particular number.

And at that number or below,

there is a certain team bonus

number that each member of that team

gets,

which is a percentage of the fee revenue

generated by that team. Once they hit

milestones above that number, they

get what we call performance boosts.

I could be misremembering it.

It doesn't matter exactly,

but the threshold number I believe

is $2 million or 2.5 million.

That's what they're expected to

generate. And they do get a percentage.

I don't remember what it is.

Each of the team members gets that

percentage at that. Then after that,

if it goes up to 2.5 million or three

million or five million or 10 million,

there are performance boosts which give

them a slightly higher percentage of

those numbers,

which creates very good positive

incentives for the teams to perform

beyond their baseline threshold

numbers because it's really an

exponential. They not only get

the percentage for that baseline,

but they then get a higher percentage

for the entirety of what they've

generated. And if you start

to do the numbers there,

it starts to translate into quite a

very large bonus number just on that

team bonus.

So that's the team.

But one thing we recognized is we don't

want to have a balkanized firm where

each team is so competitive with

another team that people are trying to

cherry-pick cases or they're getting

frustrated that maybe this particular case

went to a different team,

or they're not willing to help out with

a deposition or work on a brief that may

contribute to the success of another team.

And so there's an enormous value

on not only the team's success,

but on everybody being vested in the

success of the enterprise as a whole.

So not only does everybody have

a team bonus percentage of their

compensation,

but they also have a firm-wide

bonus that's separate and

apart from the team bonus.

That firm-wide bonus is all

of our lawyers collectively,

there's a hundred percentage

points on the firm-wide bonus.

And each year at their final annual

reviews at the end of the year,

we roll out to the lawyers what we

propose that their respective percentage

of the firm-wide bonus will be. And

that's where I was saying these things,

they can accommodate other criteria that

are important to firm building as an

enterprise. So their number,

their overall number of the firm-wide

bonus depends on things such as seniority

within the firm,

leadership within the firm,

if they take on roles that

are outside of their casework,

but are exhibiting leadership in other

ways. Leadership outside the firm,

are they helping to generate business?

Are they going around

speaking at conferences?

Are they building a reputation

outside of the firm? Just overall,

are they someone who's adhering to

our core values and then also just

their performance? So we

factor all of those things in.

There's no lockstep thing where you've

been here a certain number of years,

you get X or Y,

but that lawyer gets that percentage

of the firm-wide bonus too.

And then that firm-wide bonus also has

different milestones where there are

bumps. So there's a percentage. If

the firm hits a number, 10 million,

there's a number, it bumps up

a little bit. If we hit 15,

there's another bump up. If we hit

20 million, there's another bump up.

And all the way up to our four-year

revenue goal of 50 million,

there's another bump up.

So every individual lawyer's salary at

the end of the year then is a sum of

their base salary, their team

bonus, and their firm-wide bonus.

There's one final group within our

firm, which is not the trial team,

we call it the IECU.

People have heard about it.

That's what we call the intake

evaluation and core case unit.

The lawyer who manages that,

her team bonus is based on the

production of the IECU as a unit,

but she also participates

in the team bonus.

And that's really important because part

of their job is to help screen cases,

but they are handing off the best,

most valuable cases to our trial teams.

And so we certainly don't want to have a

situation where our IECU lawyer

feels like I'm doing all this

hard work, screening,

evaluating, triaging cases.

Now I'm handing off our really high value

cases to another team and I don't get

to enjoy the benefits of that.

But she does because she's bonused

off of that firm-wide bonus.

And so when you add all

those things together,

you plug them all into a spreadsheet,

you put in all the numbers that

each team is making in a year,

and the firm is making,

and the numbers crunch in,

and you can see every lawyer can see

what they would be earning in base salary

and bonus for the year.

And I can tell you that it is

extremely generous compensation package

if our firm is performing the way

we expect the firm to perform.

And so not only is it transparent,

it's extremely generous. I think it

is if one were an equity partner at

any other firm or any competitor firm,

they would not likely be able to earn

the same level of compensation they

can at our firm, even without

having equity. And frankly,

there's not a huge distinction between

having a bonus plan that gives you a

right to a percentage of fee

revenue and having equity anyway.

I think it accomplishes the goal of

satisfying lawyers who are looking

for appropriate fair compensation,

but in a context where they don't have

technical equity in an enterprise,

which also there's a benefit to that

too for them because they don't have the

downside risk. That's a real mouthful.

I know we've sort of out of time now,

but I wanted to get it all out there

because people have specifically asked for

those details. Again, if anybody

wants to follow up with Jeff,

send him an email.

We're happy to send you the spreadsheet,

policy we have for attorney compensation,

and feel free to edit and

tweak that to your own needs.

That was great, Ben.

I think to wrap it up,

what we've developed is something

that speaks to attorneys in multiple

ways and allows us to have

attorneys that are very driven

toward their team bonus,

but also very driven to do what's

best on behalf of the firm and the

other teams. And by

structuring it that way,

it feeds right back into the type of

culture that we want to develop here.

I love the bonus structure

and our attorneys through

their hard work are really

going to be the benefits of a

generous structure. All right,

I think we're wrapping.

Appreciate it, Ben.

All right everyone, until

next time. Thanks, Jeff.

Thanks for listening to Elevate.

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