I read with great interest The New York Times front page story yesterday (August 2) about the Paul Weiss law firm’s Faustian bargain with Trump to back off from all things “woke” and contribute millions of dollars of pro bona work to his various causes. This is a sad time for a firm that used to be the crown jewel of public interest legal work.
But what really caught my attention was the reference to how much money the partners of this “formerly prestigious” law firm make. Before the surrender happened, according to the Times, partners at Paul Weiss were making about $2 million a year on average, which itself seems on the high side to me, but I understand that prestigious law firms pay the partners a lot. But what caught my eye was that following the Trump sellout, the top partners according to the Times are now making about $20 million each with all other partners making on average about $8 million each. What I am trying to figure out is how they get away with this and who pays them all this money. According to “Glass Door,” the organization that tracks legal compensation, legislative assistants make about $ 63,000 a year at Paul Weiss and associates start at about $275,000 a year and top out about $400,000. How do you get from those numbers to $20 million or even a meager $8 million? And how typical is this among so called prestigious law firms?
The only way that you can get to these high numbers is that if these firms somehow get a piece of the action (or a fee based on a percentage of the deal) in lucrative mergers and acquisitions or similar work. They will tell you that this does not happen because lawyers must remain independent and objective and compensation is based exclusively on hourly billing rates. So, what would the hourly billing rates have to be to support an income of $20 million a year? Assuming the Big Hitter partners work seven days a week, 15 hours a day and never take vacations or holidays, to generate an income of $20 million would require a billing rate of about $3,600/hour. For $8 million it would require a rate of about $1,500/hour and that also assumes a work week of 15 hours a day, seven days a week, no vacations, holidays or time off and no pro bona work.
This reminds me of the story about a lawyer from a prestigious firm meeting St Peter at the Pearly Gates when the saint exclaimed, “Oh my goodness, you died so young. I have reviewed your billings at your firm and calculated that you had to be at least 150 years old!”
And of course, these people do not put in 100-hour work weeks routinely. They also take fancy vacations and eat at expensive restaurants. If they worked a “normal” 40-hour week, the required billing rate for a partner making $20 million would be $7,150/hour or about $120/minute. For someone being paid $8 million, the hourly rate would be mere $4,000, a real bargain.
And who would pay those kinds of fees to lawyers anyway? A lawyer friend told me that quoted hourly rates are much lower than what you would think because the partners make all that money by “leveraging” the work of the associates.
Okay, as one who started and ran a consulting firm for almost 20 years and certainly did not make anything remotely close $20 million a year—or for that matter, even a very tiny fraction of that– but worked just as hard as these high paid lawyers, I have got to say something is very wrong with this picture and that the excessive income and wealth of a very small percentage of the work force in the United States today is a big reason for the discontent in our society. And of course it is not just elite lawyers who are guilty. CEOs of major corporations are just as bad or even worse. We know about the excessive wealth of the tech bros caused by the boom in AI, but the disparity between management and workers in major corporations is also a huge problem and it is ubiquitous. Before the deregulation beginning in the 1980s the difference between the income of the CEO of a Fortune 500 Company and an average worker was about 30 to 1. Today it is almost 300 to 1.
And, of course, we know the problem is wide because a very high percentage of the population is struggling just to pay rent or the mortgage, put food on the table, and pay for health care. Some recent surveys in 2026 indicate that 81 percent of adults view the rising cost of living as a major barrier to financial stability, with nearly half of families reporting they fall short of what is needed to comfortably cover all living essentials.
Friends, we are living in the Second Gilded Age where the rich get richer and the average family is struggling. Unless we can figure out a way to get out of the mess we are in and create a fairer and more just society, we will be in deep trouble and our time as the “leader of the free world” will come to an end just as it has for all the great countries and empires that have preceded ours.