How Does Our Evaluation and Compensation Process Encourage Good Client Service?
All humans (some more than others) can be influenced by relative economic returns. Compensation systems that reward behavior that can be inconsistent with good client service are likely to deter at least some lawyers from serving clients as effectively as they could be served. We believe that everyone in the Firm - partners, other lawyers, and staff - should be compensated based on their relative contribution to the overall success of the Firm. Our compensation decisions are individual, not lockstep, and are not based on formulas of any kind, but rather on an evaluation of the relative contribution of each person to the overall success of the Firm.
As noted earlier, our Managing Partner has considerable management responsibility at Jones Day; that responsibility includes setting individual lawyer compensation. These are obviously decisions that our partners and associates must believe are fairly made and objectively rational over time. This is made more likely by a very thorough annual evaluation process for partners and associates, which produces a substantial amount of both objective and subjective data on which to base compensation decisions. This includes, for both partners and associates, written and oral evaluations by multiple lawyers who have worked with or supervised a lawyer. That data is reviewed thoroughly, and final decisions are made by the Managing Partner based on the entirety of this process. Perhaps the best evidence that the process works fairly and effectively is the very small number of Jones Day partners who leave for other peer firms.
Partners and associates are evaluated pursuant to similar criteria and through similar processes.
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