Our starting salary for first-year associates in Minnesota and Colorado is $110,000 per year. In Iowa, our starting salary is $95,000 per year.
Our compensation structure is confidential, rewarding and equitable. At year end, our management committee engages in a thorough review of each lawyer's contributions to the firm and sets the annual compensation for each associate, partner, and special counsel. The excess of total compensation over a lawyer's base compensation (which is paid monthly) is paid as a year-end bonus.
To guide the committee's review, we give each lawyer the opportunity to prepare an annual report of his or her overall activities. We then evaluate associates, special counsel and partners alike by the same ten factors, which includes not only your billable hours but also other criteria such as ability as a lawyer, standing in the profession and the community, time and attention given to the practice of law, ability to satisfy and develop clients, non-billable endeavors, teamwork, and development of new areas of expertise. These are the core values that we have used for decades in assessing both compensation and partnership.
We believe our individualized and confidential approach to setting compensation reflects and promotes our culture of collaboration and teamwork.
We support lawyers who choose to take parental leave and/or work reduced schedules. We are committed to creating an opportunity for lawyers to reconcile the competing time demands of practicing law and raising children. To help accomplish this goal, we have developed generous child care leave and reduced time guidelines for our lawyers.
Our policy gives lawyers up to one year leave for each child, and lawyers may work reduced time for child care purposes as long as they wish. After one year at our firm, we also offer six weeks of salary continuation during parenting leave for men and women associates. These six weeks are available to all new parents and are in addition to medical leave periods for mothers who have given birth. Several of our lawyers work reduced schedules, including a number of lawyers who have become partners while working reduced time.
We offer a competitive benefits program which includes:
- $10,000 salary advance
- comprehensive health, dental, disability, and life insurance
- an opportunity to participate in a 401(k) savings plan
- reimbursement of expenses associated with admission to the Minnesota, Colorado, or Iowa bar, including the bar review course and examination fee
- reimbursement of costs to relocate you to one of our cities, and we provide a moving company to assist with your move
- reimbursement of associates for their annual attorney licensing fee, membership in the state and local bar association and the costs of Continuing Legal Education course requirements
- flexible spending accounts for medical and dependent care reimbursement
- pre-tax payroll deductions for qualified parking expenses and our Metropass program
- back-up child care services
- laptop computers and BlackBerry PDAs